


The Semantics of Crop Circle Formation: a case study by Sherlock Holmes [unpublished]

by canolacrush



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: ...kind of, ...so many footnotes, Aliens, Alternate Universe, Author's Personal Quest to Teach You Stuff About Random Things, BAMF John Watson, Case Fic, Footnotes, M/M, Not Season 3 Compliant, POV First Person, POV Sherlock Holmes, Post-Reichenbach, Sherlock is a cockblock, Sherlock is also his own cockblock, Wordplay, but not a Reunion Fic, off-screen violence against livestock, sex of a sort in a time and a place
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-05
Updated: 2013-10-23
Packaged: 2017-12-25 11:03:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 41,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/952315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/canolacrush/pseuds/canolacrush
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Look at these photographs," I said, gesturing to the wall of crop circles.  "What do you observe?"</p><p>"Crop circles," John replied.</p><p>"Obvious.  What else?"</p><p>"Are...are those <em>intestines</em> surrounding them?"</p><p>"Yes.  The majority are bovine and ovine in origin.  The farmers who have acquired these crop circles in their fields have also had a tenth of their livestock murdered and arranged thus."</p><p>"<em>Why?</em>" John said, presumably in a rhetorical fashion.</p><p>I detest rhetorical questions.  "That is what I must find out, John."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Introduction

**Author's Note:**

> First of all, many thanks to my beta Shaindy, who has stuck with this monster through thick and thin, put up with my neurotic nitpicky questions, and who still managed to propose to me on no less than 5 separate occasions despite our differing opinions on a certain French author. <3
> 
>  **A/N** : Any technical notes from me (such as disclaimers, warnings, etc.) you'll see up in these headnotes. However, Sherlock also has his own set of numbered footnotes in this fic, where you can generally find him berating himself for missing an obvious clue, randomly making research notes to himself, or possibly grumbling like a petulant teenager about something John's teased him about. Hope you enjoy those. ;-)
> 
>  **Disclaimer** : It goes without saying that I don't own or make any profit from the characters of BBC Sherlock. Furthermore, all religious organisations, social media sites, and original characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real religious organisations/social media sites/people is purely coincidental. (Which ends up being the case for the fictional social media site I invented for this fic--"IrisNet"--which is in no way related to whatever the real IrisNet is [and, er, it was a bit too late to change it when I discovered the coincidence, whoops].)
> 
>  **Warnings** : Comments could contain spoilers! Don't read them if you don't want to be spoiled for what happens in each or in future chapters!
> 
> Now, without further ado, I leave you with this untranslated epitaph that has nothing to do with this fic:
> 
>   
> _« Mais pourquoi parles-tu toujours par énigmes?» [dit le petit prince.]  
>  — Je les résous toutes », dit le serpent._ 
> 
> —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, _Le Petit Prince_ (1943)

 

 

 

 _Objective_ :

> In penning the events of this case and scrutinising the mental processes that led to its disastrous conclusion, I hope to illuminate the variables that led to its failure and consequentially learn from these errors so that the like cannot be repeated in future investigations.

 

 _Hypothesis_ :

> I suspect the case proved unsuccessful due to my failure to recognise and investigate the connotations of significant symbols displayed at the crime scenes.

 

_Literature Review:_

> If the statistics are to be trusted, an average of 201.41 crop circles are reported each year, with a corresponding mean of approximately 97 formations arising in England alone.[1]  95% of crop circle formations can be rationally explained—hoaxes, publicity stunts, artistic endeavours, cries for attention, etc.  Very few of these phenomena are also accompanied by murdered livestock, so prior literature on the subject proves unhelpful.

 

 _The Case_ :

> A handful farmers in July 2017 who reported having crop circles also reported a tenth of their livestock—cattle, sheep, pigs, or some such creature—being brutally murdered in the same night, their entrails scattered around the edges of the crop circles.  In short, a very specific decimation of animals, surely to serve some purpose or message, in conjunction with apocryphal patterns etched in grain fields.

           

 _The Initial Suspects_ :

> **Aliens** —preposterous, seeing as if there were such beings in the universe advanced enough to accomplish intergalactic space travel, they would have sound scientific minds and methods.  They would hardly waste such knowledge on the mindless slaughter and arrangement of entrails.  More likely the mark of religious fanatics.
> 
> **Religious Fanatics** —possible, especially ones that maintain that there is extraterrestrial life in the universe and that we should fear it.  Or possibly worship it, if slaughtered animals are interpreted as sacrifices.
> 
> **Bored Teenagers** —possible, although they would have to display psychological behaviour reminiscent of serial killers if they are prepared to massacre vast quantities of livestock with such cruelty and consistent _modus operandi_.
> 
> **Serial Killer of Livestock** —interesting, perhaps not separate from Bored Teenagers but could be.  Motive for using crop circles unclear, perhaps wanted easy scapegoat, or perhaps just creative.

 

These were the potential theories swimming through my mind as I examined the web of different crop formation pictures pinned to the wall of my flat.  Each pattern was different; here was one from Wiltshire made of two triangles touching at the same point like an hourglass, there another from Oxfordshire made of concentric circles, a third from Derbyshire spiralling out like a ribbon of deoxyribonucleic acid, and a fourth again in Wiltshire mimicking a skull-and-crossbones insignia.  There was no clear consistency to the patterns—the only consistency being the lining of animal organs surrounding them.  Therefore, I believed that it was possible that the crop circles themselves were not what was important, but rather the _idea_ associated with crop circles and the significance of the animal killings.

I heard the door downstairs open.  John was home, and from the sound of his tread upon the stair, laden with this week’s groceries.  “John,” I said.

“In a minute,” he answered from the kitchen.  There was the sound of bags being set on the counter.

“John,” I called again.

“Yeah, hang on.”  Next, the sound of the refrigerator opening, John putting away milk and orange juice, shuffling the jar of pickled ears to the side to make room for butter.  The fridge door closed.  John stepped into the living room.  “What is it?”

“Look at these photographs,” I said, gesturing to the wall of crop circles.  “What do you observe?”

He stepped beside me, and I glanced at him from the corner of my eye—haircut, phone number of some woman he met at the grocery store peeking out from his jean pocket, a few wet marks on his jumper showing he’d been caught in a brief rain shower on the way home—before returning my gaze to the pictures.

“Crop circles,” John replied.

“Obvious.  What else?”

I could practically feel the force of his squinting in concentration and could not help smiling a little, briefly.

“Are…are those _intestines_ surrounding them?”

“Yes.  The majority are bovine and ovine in origin.  The farmers who have acquired these crop circles in their fields have also had a tenth of their livestock murdered and arranged thus.”

“ _Why?_ ” John said, presumably in a rhetorical fashion.

I detest rhetorical questions.  “That is what I must find out, John.  Do you observe anything else?”

Suddenly John snorted, and I turned sharply to him.  He was smiling, a hand to his lips, clearly trying not to laugh.  I frowned; his was an unusual reaction.  “What about this is funny, John?”

“Ah, sorry,” he said, waving off his mirth and consequently my question, despite it not being rhetorical.  He reached out and pulled a picture off the wall, the DNA-looking pattern.  “This one’s different,” he declared, without an ounce of doubt.

“How so?” I asked, curious as to his source of confidence, wondering what _he_ had seen that I had not.

“Look here.” He pointed at the curves of the pattern.  “The pressed-down part is a bit darker than the compressed parts in the other patterns.  These grains have been heated, almost burned as they were pressed down.  All the other ones were just pressed down with a flat board or something.  This one here—”  He tapped the photo with a finger and sent me a smile.  “—is genuine.”

All at once I was flooded with a new scenario in this case, which complicated the problem much more appetizingly: having a true perpetrator—the author of the majority of the crop circles—in addition to an imitator, who created the unique ‘heated’ crop circle.  But before I pursued that theory, I was compelled to solve a different mystery: how John had known what to look for when he so often does not know which details are the important ones; how he had seen the detail before I had.  “Genuine?  What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well—”  John shrugged.  “—that’s the theory nowadays, that the ‘real’ crop circles are made with heat and not just compression.  They had a programme about it on telly the other day.”

“Is that so,” I said, gazing at him.  He was standing still, looking mild and unassuming and pleasant, but not quite in the way he usually looked mild and unassuming and pleasant.  It was the way he held himself when he was hiding something, a certain _enforced_ rigidity in the relaxed countenance he wore.  “I fail to see how that makes it funny.”

John handed me back the picture with a smile and a shrug.  “I was just imagining that the crop circle said something rather rude,” he replied.  He was heading toward the kitchen, presumably to start the kettle for afternoon tea.

I followed him, still holding the picture in my hand.  “Why would you imagine that?”  I asked, because honestly who would come up with _that_ when looking at a crop circle circumscribed by animal entrails?

“Dunno,” John said.  He filled the pitcher with water, then depressed the button and reached up to grab some mugs from the cabinet.  “Just seems like the sort of thing a bored bloke might do, scribble rude graffiti on things.”

One had to give John credit for his turn of phrase sometimes; he turned serial killer-cabbies into ‘not very nice men’ and intestine-slathered, complex crop circles into ‘graffiti.’  It’s one of the many reasons I’ve found him an agreeable flatmate and companion over the years.  “What do you imagine it said, then?”  I inquired, keeping in the vein of his pawky humour.

“ _I’m surrounded by arseholes_.”

I laughed, and John, as always, followed after.

 

***

 

On the third day into the case, I was beginning to feel the gnawing frustration of not having enough solid evidence to sustain any working theory.  In an effort to trick my mind into processing the information faster, I had applied two nicotine patches, stolen the slip of paper with the name and number of the woman John had met in the grocery store (Jessica—she had the handwriting of a common secretary; dull), rolled the paper into a hollow straw, and laid back on the couch, mock-smoking through the paper.  The nicotine was working, but the mock-cigarette was not.  I sighed, ground my teeth slightly on the paper between my lips, then pulled the prop away and dropped it to the floor, exhaling through my mouth.

In the past three days, I had gone through the tedious process of re-questioning the victimized farmers, but I had not gained much information from them—none had rivals or enemies, none had met any of the other victimized farmers before, none had strayed outside their routine for the past three weeks.  None reported sighting anything unusual or extraterrestrial happening during the night of the attacks, and none reported hearing any sounds of distress from their livestock at the times either.  The most this told me was that the killer knew how to be exceptionally stealthy and was familiar with the ways of livestock; it was also something he had to have planned carefully.  This likely knocked out the Bored Teenager theory; most youths would hardly take the time and effort to plan something this elaborate, nor would they have the resources and panache to execute it multiple times over geographically disparate locations.

Furthermore, the crime scenes themselves had of course been ruinously tampered with—carrion birds had set upon the entrails within minutes, and there had been a rain system that had swept through the sites before I had a chance to examine them properly.  I merely had the photographs to rely on, now several days old.  They would have to be enough.

Then there was the aberration of the ‘DNA’ crop circle; it surely had to be an imitator, since the circle was chronologically second in a series of four—if the main perpetrator had chosen to ‘authenticate’ his patterns, he would have continued the improvement, not reverted back to his original method.  But why imitate this crime, and why put in more effort to ‘show up’ his predecessor?  Was the imitator a rival?  Or merely an overzealous acolyte?

Needing some place to start, I had had John searching the Internet for religious sects devoted to the idea of life beyond Earth, and there had been several different organisations that popped up: Beyond Horizons Ministries, the Universal Church of Universal Unity, _Asdiqa' Llghrba' Al-Samawiya **[2]**_ , the Church of the Reverend Simeon Sinclair, and several others.  They varied in membership from a couple hundred to a mere dozen or so; I told John to keep an eye on the IrisNet accounts of each of the organisations’ leaders for unusual updates.  I myself had searched for sects that regularly practiced some form of animal sacrifice—they were fewer in number, comprising mostly of either studiously orthodox ancient religions, contemporary black magic cults, or some hybrid sects that combined a bit of both.  By all appearances, John’s findings and mine did not seem to overlap.

So when a new text arrived from Lestrade on that third evening ( _Got a new one in Warwick_ ), I bounded for the door, remembering to collect my coat, scarf, and Mycroft’s credit card before exiting the flat.  I hailed the nearest cab for the train station, consumed with the excitement of fresh evidence—evidence I would _not_ let slip through my fingers.

I was on the train when I remembered that John was still in London, likely having just returned to the flat and probably wondering where I’d gone off to when he had just popped out to get some take-away.  I retrieved my phone.

 _Warwick_.  _SH_

I thought for a moment, calculating what I might need that I did not already have stored in my coat.

_Bring sealable plastic baggies.  SH_

There was a soft ping as I received John’s reply.

_What the hell, Sherlock?  I leave for ten minutes and you scarper off to Warwick!_

_I need to examine the evidence while it’s fresh.  SH_

_You couldn’t’ve waited for me?!_

_Last train’s in twenty minutes.  You’d better hurry.  SH_

_I have work in the morning, Sherlock!  I’m not buggering off to Warwick at this hour!_

_I need you.  SH_

There was a pause before I got his next reply.

_You absolute wanker._

_Bring the baggies.  SH_

I pocketed the phone once more and gazed out the window; the sky was a couple of hours from sunset, and I had to use all the daylight I could get when I arrived on the crime scene.  I could only hope that John arrived in time for some sun to see by; if his last examination of crop circles could yield such useful data, perhaps his eye would be helpful again.  Besides, he had the baggies.

 

***

 

The sight of the carnage was not as great as the profound stink that emanated from it; the chalky soil surrounding the crop circle was crusted with animal blood, and the stench of exposed organs that had been quietly decomposing in the sun during the day would be enough to perturb any person who is a novice to the world of crime or butchery.  Fortunately, I am no neophyte.  The officer from Warwick who was watching over the site and apparently “keeping a close eye on me” (per Lestrade’s handling instructions)—a DI Erica Tanner or some such person—stayed well back from the circle at my request for work room, waving a hand in front of her face at the smell.

The criminal appeared to have a regular method in his manner of killing the beasts.  The ground was laden with hoof marks leading from the pasture where the sheep had resided to the perimeter of the crop circle: the murderer had led the sheep out, one by one, and guided them around the flattened grains, at some point slitting their throats.  When the sheep had bled out, he cut them open and scattered the entrails, rolling the remaining husks just barely off the path.  The flurry of hoof marks in the bloody dirt obscured what footprints I could find—likely an intentional attempt to complicate tracking the culprit.  From what I _could_ see, I could determine that the man wore a size 8.5 shoe and was perhaps around 5 foot 7 inches tall.  There seemed to be only one man involved—a seemingly inhuman accomplishment for the frame of a single night: alone, he had constructed a 100-meter diameter crop circle in the shape of a star-like dodecagon; alone, he had slaughtered a tenth of the farmer’s stock of sheep, a number equalling forty-two animals.  Considering that farmers also tended to rise at dawn, it is a wonder where the killer found the time to achieve all he endeavoured.

The sun was setting, and I was idly wondering if the entire thing could be solved with a sniffer dog when John appeared beside me, looking cross yet resigned as he held out a handful of sealable plastic baggies.

“Ah,” I said, taking the baggies from him and stuffing them in my pocket.  I continued pacing the perimeter of the crop circle, with John falling into step beside me.  Our stretched shadows in the falling light seemed to join at the head some distance away.

“PETA would have a field day with this,” John commented idly.

“I am sure they would.”

“What did you need the bags for?”

I smiled when I spotted the target I’d had my eye on—a perfectly excised sheep heart, perhaps still salvageable if doused in enough preservative fluid.

“Sherlock, _no_.”  Apparently John had seen the direction of my gaze.

“Why not?  It’s not like anyone else will be using it now.”

“Because it’s a crime scene and that’s _evidence_.  It’s _illegal_ to remove evidence without police authorisation.”

“There’s plenty of evidence lying around here; one missing heart won’t make a difference in the analysis.  I’ll return it when I’m done with it.”  I pulled off my jacket, handed it to John, then bent toward the sheep heart with the plastic bag flipped inside out and covering my hand.  I closed my fingers around the heart, lifted it from the ground, and pulled the folds of the plastic bag the right way around, neatly sealing it closed.  I waggled the bagged heart at John with a brief grin.  “I believe if you ask Detective Inspector Tanner _very nicely_ , John, she may be willing to overlook this minor transgression in exchange for the promise of dinner.”

He immediately looked to the overseeing officer, who had been blatantly staring at him with interest for the past five minutes.  He turned back to me, looking a tad incredulous.  “And since when did you start becoming my wingman?” he asked suspiciously.

“Please, John, I’m hardly your wingman.”  I traded him the heart for my coat, pulled it back on, then stuffed the heart in a pocket.  “You’re winging _me_.”

He raised his eyebrows.  “If you make a quip about being the one who’s stealing hearts around here, I’m walking out.”

“It isn’t stealing if you have permission,” I said.

He raised his eyes to the sky and sighed, resigned.  He then cast another glance at DI Tanner and sent her a small smile.  She returned it.

I rolled my eyes and turned back to the crop formation.  “John, stop flirting.  This is a crime scene.”

He blinked and frowned.  “ _You_ were the one who wanted me to—”

“ _After_ we are done here.  You have ten minutes of daylight remaining, John; tell me what you see.”

I turned to John, to study where it was he looked and how he reacted.  He licked his lips, and his eyes flicked to follow the bloody trail of organs; his eyebrows furrowed together.  He directed his gaze to the flattened wheat and made a “hm” sound.  Then, to my surprise, he looked pointedly to the horizon, where the sun was descending.  I broke my observation of him to look there as well; the sky was clear, with the first brightest stars sneaking their way into the growing twilight.

John said, “I wonder how he got all those sheep to keep quiet?  I mean, sheep aren’t the brightest things in the world, but most herd animals get skittish when they see or smell something strange.  Survival instincts and all that—don’t want to be near something that would lure predators.  Maybe he had to blindfold them.”

“Good, John.”  It was something I had assumed myself, but seeing as I knew little about sheep, this verification could be helpful in identifying the murderer—he very clearly _must_ be an expert of livestock behaviour.  “Go on.”

John smiled at the praise, and continued, “The crop circle looks a bit like a compass rose.  The big point is directly facing the setting sun.”

That fact did not seem consequential to anything, especially since none of the other crop circles had meant much so far.  “Insubstantial.  What else?” I urged.

He frowned slightly, then crossed his arms and nodded to the setting sun.  “We’ll get a nice view of Mercury in a minute, just above the horizon there.”

I looked and, sure enough, a moment later there was a bright dot in the sky about twenty-five degrees away from the sun.  “How are you sure that’s Mercury?” I asked him, because the knowledge of how one bright dot in the sky differed from another bright dot always seemed like a waste of effort to me.

“It’s brighter than the other ones, and Venus is already over there,” John replied, pointing upwards a bit more.  There was a bright dot directly in line with his outstretched finger, about forty degrees away from the sunset.

In that last lingering glow of twilight, for just a moment, John had seemed taller—perhaps it was the optical trick of his elongated shadow that was the cause for such an illusion.  Regardless of the cause, however, the confident air in which he held himself enhanced the effect.  John had stood as a mountain would stand against a cloud, unconcerned of rain and holding his head above it, as if he had known the ways of clouds for all his life.  It filled me with suspicion, though of what I did not yet know.

“John,” I said.  “How did you know Mercury would be there?”

He at least had the decency to look sheepish—well, healthily so, in comparison to the state of sheepishness at our feet.  He rubbed the back of his neck and began pacing back toward the officer waiting near the road; I walked alongside him.  “Well, back when I was a kid,” he began.  “My dad would take me out at nights to study the stars; he always liked to tell me that when you knew where you were in the universe, you’d never get lost.”

I sighed; it was a disappointingly _typical_ answer.  “Sentiment,” I affirmed.

“Yeah, well, that ‘sentiment’ has gotten me out of trouble more than once, and it happens to mean a lot to me,” John retorted.  I glanced at him from the corner of my eye; he was frowning, lips pursed.  I’d managed to offend him.

I rolled my eyes, wondering when he’d understand that it was never my _intention_ to insult him; I simply state things as they are.  An awkward pause later, I asked, “And the crop circle?  Was it ‘genuine’?”

He huffed a little.  “No, not even close,” he replied.

“Thank you, John,” I said, as kindly as I could.  It was something I knew already, but John, rather like myself at times, enjoyed being recognised for his personal expertise in small ways.  “Although Mercury seems an accident at best,” I added, because giving John too much of an ego boost would negatively affect his usefulness as a careful observer.  “What would a sheep-killer have to do with some pointless planet?”

John tripped slightly over a rock in the dark, then continued on beside me.  “Because it’s a _crop circle_ , Sherlock.  It’s supposed to come from aliens in the sky.  It’s a logical connection.”

“ _Aliens_ , John?” I teased, smirking at him.  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Well, Mercury was the messenger god.  Maybe it’s meant as a message?”

I snorted.  “Yes, and I’m sure the next one will lead us to buried treasure.”  I waved him off toward Erica Tanner.  “Go amuse your date for next Friday and secure me my heart, but don’t get too friendly; she’s still holding a candle for another man who looks very much like you.”

 

* * *

  
 

[1] Averages taken from data from the _International Crop Circle Archive_ , <http://www.kornkreise-forschung.de/textStatistics.htm>

[2] Loosely translates from Arabic into “Friends of the Celestial Strangers”


	2. Experimental - Materials

We managed to procure a room in a small bed-and-breakfast to wait out the rest of the night until the first train out.  I charmed the dowdy landlady into allowing me to store my heart in her freezer in the kitchen downstairs, and John checked IrisNet updates from religious leaders.

“The Church of Simeon Sinclair is having a bake sale tomorrow,” John said, stretched out on the paisley bedspread with his phone in one hand.  “Two pounds for a little bag of alien sugar biscuits, five pounds for UFO cupcakes.”

“Hm,” I said, throwing my coat and scarf into a chair before stretching myself out next to John on the bed.  I folded my hands together, touched my fingertips to my chin, and closed my eyes.  Began processing.

Who would be so familiar with the ways of livestock to pull off such a systematic stream of murders?  The victimized farmers, undoubtedly, had the knowledge but not the motive: even with the prospect of fame and attention, most farmers would not sacrifice their profits and hard work for the sake of a spectacle.  Farm hands?  A possibility—they had access to the knowledge and familiarity with the herds.  Perhaps they held grudges against their employers?  No, how would they all have had the same idea?  A secret organisation?  How?

“Are you going to be thinking all night?” John said.

“Yes.  So do shut up.”

“Want any tea?  The room has a kettle.”

Were the crop circles just a means of scapegoat?  They had to be.[3]  Triangles, circles, DNA, skull-and-bones, compass rose—no clear connection between them.  Jolly Roger and compass rose: pirates?  No.  Ludicrous.

“Sherlock?”

“No I don’t want _tea_ ,” I said, opening my eyes to glare at the ceiling.  “What I want is _quiet_.”

In my peripherals, John raised his hands in a mollifying gesture.  “All right, have it your way.  But I’m going to bed.”  His phone made soft beeping noises as he set an alarm.  “We’re getting up early, just so you know.  I still have a shift in the morning, and I’m not planning on missing it.”

I closed my eyes again to refocus.  John rustled noisily as he took off his jumper, socks, and jeans, settled under the covers, then scratched at the stubble forming along his jaw.

“We’re going to be a right sight in the morning,” he mumbled.  “Scruffy and wearing day-old clothes on the morning commute to London.  As if people don’t talk enough as it is.”

“Let them talk, John,” I replied, an amused twitch at the corner of my mouth escaping in spite of my best attempts to remain focused.  “Loose lips sink ships.”

“Do you even understand what that means?” John said.

“Not especially.”

He giggled, and I allowed myself to chortle with him a little.

“G’night, Sherlock,” he said affectionately, and clicked off the light.

“Sleep well, John.”

It took twenty minutes for John to fall into deep sleep.  John is by habit a light sleeper, which is why it is somewhat unusual that he also sleep-talks on occasion; one would think that he would wake himself up with the talking.  But regardless of how his subconscious manages this incongruous feat, I have discovered through previous encounters that I am able to take advantage of this unusual characteristic of John’s for the benefit of my casework if I keep my voice to a steady, low timbre.  Subconscious John is quite different from the Waking John: he is quicker to make connections, and he follows my path of logic without an ounce of confusion.  He also has a bit of a foul mouth, but generally Subconscious John is a very useful idea-bouncer.  Which is why, when John began to make the mumbly noises signalling the oncoming of a sleep-talking episode, I turned to him eagerly.

“Isn’t it time…” John began.  “…for the elephants?”

“Not quite, John,” I murmured.

“Oh…bollocks.  I needed ‘em.  Pissers should’ve phoned ahead.”

“Yes, they should have.  John, do you remember the crop circles?”

“…Yeah.”

“Who made them?”

“Buggers with cloth.”

“To blindfold animals?”

“…Yeah.”

“Was it one or more men?”

John grunted and sniffled, which generally meant he didn’t know.

“What do the crop circles mean?”

“Piss off.”

“Is that what they say, John?”

“Think, git.”  ‘Git’ was Subconscious John’s way of addressing me.

I considered John’s answers for a moment: perhaps what the crop circles ‘meant’ and what they ‘said’ were different from each other?  Or possibly John just didn’t want to talk about them.

“Do you like the crop circles, John?” I asked, sticking with a generic way to keep John talking.

Curiously, John made a high-pitched noise, almost a whimper.

I frowned.  “John?”

After a moment, John mumbled, “No...no.”

“Why not?” I urged, because John was looking unusually concerned—his breath rate had quickened, his brow was slightly furrowed.

John suddenly lapsed into a lengthy spiel in what I can only assume was another language—maybe Pashto or Dari, considering his time in Afghanistan—and which ended in “that fucking git.”  He sighed, then seemed to still.

“John?” I said softly.  I waited—no response.  “John, how much do you know about crop circles?”

He snorted.  “More ‘n you, git,” he grumbled, then flipped and flung an arm into my face.

I sighed and moved the arm from my face onto a pillow.  When I tried to engage John’s subconscious again, I received no response; he had lapsed out of the deep sleep state and had moved into that tenuous state of sleep where he was more easily awakened—it was better not to disturb him.  Subconscious John had been unhelpful this time, although the session was not without interest.  In my previous encounters with his sleep-talking, John had never switched into another language before, and his stressed reaction to the crop circles was intriguing.  Why he was unwilling to share his knowledge, however, was still a mystery.  With a sigh, I attempted to return to the matter at hand.

Five crop circles, two or more authors, one clear imitation.  Where was the link between them, the one perfect puzzle piece to make everything fall together?  What was the _motive_?  Cost damage?  Revenge?  Fear-mongering?  The growing list of possible perpetrators had only narrowed down slightly over the past few days:

 

> **Aliens** —still preposterous
> 
> **Religious Fanatics** —only still feasible if they have knowledge of livestock, looking unlikely
> 
> **Bored Teenagers** —no
> 
> **Serial Killer of Livestock** —possible
> 
> **Farmers** —unlikely to kill own livestock
> 
> **Farm hands** —possible, but how did they come to coordinate?

 

I looked to John; he had gone into REM sleep.  It would be several more minutes until a potential sleep-talking episode came about, and there was no guarantee that it would happen.  I coiled my fingers together and glared at him.  John was slowly becoming an unexpected puzzle in the course of the investigation: on the one hand, he offered perceptive insight concerning the crop circles, but on the other hand, his newfound knowledge was _distracting_.  While I was trying to sort out possible suspects and motives, John’s enigma was demanding the greater attention.  It was not something that had ever happened before in our acquaintance: John had always been conducive to my work, in some form or fashion, not an obstruction.  This was…new.

Yet how could John be new now, after all these years?  Years of working together, living together?  Yes, there had been that…absence, and there had been the necessary re-adjustment to each other, but I thought I had re-learned his old quirks and comprehended the new ones—especially the one where he sometimes checked my pulse for no apparent reason, in a spontaneous need to reassure himself that I wasn’t a ghost.  But the things John was expressing—the foreign language; his accurate, precise prediction of the planets’ locations in the sky; his whole thing with crop circles—these could not be ‘new’ things.  These were old things of John, old things I’d never seen before.  But why had I never seen them?  How could I have missed it, overlooked it?  Did I delete it?

John’s breath quickened in his sleep.  His brow furrowed.  A nightmare.  He seemed to have more of them than I remembered him having in the first eighteen months of our acquaintance, though the time between _these_ episodes was growing wider as time passed on.  Perhaps his distress about the crop circles during the sleep-talking had set him off.  Carefully, I rested my hand on his arm, and his breathing gradually settled.  John had once told me, sometime in the months following my return, that he occasionally had nightmares about me falling over a waterfall (why a waterfall, we could never figure out) intermixed with the nightmares of Afghanistan.  Since reassuring him that I was there seemed to soothe the nightmare, it was probably the former scenario about which he’d been dreaming.

I sighed and closed my eyes.  The night was not being productive.  I itched for a nicotine patch but knew better than to try to move off the bed; it would wake John, and he was not the most cheerful waker on the best of days.  I only had a few more hours left before John’s alarm went off and he dragged us back to London so that he could putter around with his locum job.  One would think John would have learned that puttering around a doctor’s office was not for him; Afghanistan had been his element, a warzone devoid of waiting rooms and old magazines, with dust and flies, sweating it out in the thick sun, seeking out the injured in the grass, like an itinerant healer…

…or a veterinarian.  A veterinarian that specialises in livestock.  Surely those still made house calls?  They would have to, wouldn’t they?  There couldn’t be that many of them, could there?  They would have to know about livestock behaviour, know how to keep the beasts calm when examining them, know how to perfectly excise hearts out of sheep, know several different clients in different regions, yes, yes, it _fit!_

“John!” I shouted.

John jumped and nearly fell off the bed.  “ _Jesus_ , Sherlock, what—”

“John, you’re a genius!”  I grasped him by the shoulders and beamed at him.  “The veterinarian, of _course_!  It solves everything, John!”

John rubbed his eyes.  “It’s bloody well three in the morning, Sherlock!”

“Don’t you see, John?  Once we catch the vet, we can catch the imitator!  Oh, what a clever one this is, he targets those he heals—no one would ever suspect him.  I should have seen it, the way those organs were so carefully excised…he’s a ripper among vets.   _John, I have my own Ripper!_ ”

“Yes, fine, good for you, Sherlock.  Can this not wait until morning?” John asked, looking blearily at the bedside clock.

“No, John.  There could be another mass murder happening this very second, and I need to make phone calls.  Farmers, as it turns out, aren’t accustomed to texting before sunrise, and I must find out for sure if they’ve all had the same veterinarian recently.”

John ran a hand down his face, made a noise that resembled a muffled growl, then said, “Fine, I’ll make the tea.”

 

***

 

On the early morning train returning to London, John was dozing with his head against the window, and I was engaged in a text-exchange with Lestrade concerning the recently detained Dr. Sunyata Elliston of Avington, Berkshire.

_He confessed and came quietly._

_Must be one of the show-off types.  Kills for attention.  A performer.  I want to question him.  SH_

_Of course you do.  You have so much in common._

_Unnecessary gibe.  Donovan is rubbing off on you.  SH_

_Sorry.  You set yourself up for that one though._

I put the phone in my right pocket then reached into my left one for the sheep’s heart.  It had frozen overnight and was unfortunately beginning to thaw from my body heat.  I considered stopping by Bart’s when we arrived in London to have Molly provide me with emergency preservative fluid; although by now the heart would no longer be in optimal condition for study, I could still gain some use from it.  Perhaps if I put it somewhere where it would not be in contact with a heat source for now?  I spotted John’s jacket, which he had removed before dozing, and put the heart in a pocket.  My phone buzzed again.

_He’s refusing to explain anything._

_Even though he’s confessed?  Interesting.  SH_

_He says he’s waiting for someone._

_Obviously his lawyer.  SH_

_Lawyer’s with him._

_Curious.  SH_

Perhaps Dr. Elliston was waiting for his imitator?  Were they rivals?  Were they working together as mastermind and acolyte?  Or maybe they were equal partners?  Could they be communicating something via crop circle?  Would he be waiting for another crop circle-message from the imitator, or some other kind of message?  I closed my eyes and smiled.  This case was utterly refreshing compared to some of the more recent exploits: stolen diamonds, missing husbands, a score of tedious miscellanea.  I had my own clever Ripper, and my Ripper had a cleverer impersonator.  It seemed that for every fact I uncovered, another puzzle was waiting for me, a seemingly endless process of discovery.

And of course, I still had John, and his own contribution to the fascination this case was holding for me.  My phone buzzed again.

_Did you and John enjoy your stay in Warwick?  MH_

I deleted the message immediately, my good mood dissipated.  Mycroft always had the unique ability of sucking the fun out of a room even while not present.  Time for a distraction.

“John,” I said.

John inhaled deeply, then sat up and stretched.  “Are we back already?”

“Nearly.  Go get us tea.”

“Sherlock, if we’re nearly there, we can just have tea at the flat.”

“We’re not stopping at the flat,” I said, blankly staring out the window.  “Lestrade has the suspect at the Yard and—”

“Oh yes we are,” John objected.  “ _I_ need to shave—so do you, by the way—so that I can go to my job.  The one that helps pay the rent, Sherlock.”

I crossed my arms and continued staring out the window.  We were fast approaching London.  “I may have left something in the tea,” I said after a moment.  It was a lie, but it would serve its purpose.

There was a formidable silence coming from John’s direction.  “Sherlock…our _tea_?” he said at last, sounding every bit like I had committed a grievous sin.  “How could you even—”

“I’m sorry, John,” I replied, before his voice could escalate further.  “It was an honest mistake.  I thought you might appreciate the warning.”

From the corner of my eye, I could see that John was scrutinising me; he was suspicious, and understandably so—I’m not usually in the habit of warning him of my experiments.  When I continued staring out the window, he sighed and reached for his jacket.  He’d decided to believe me.

“You know, I think this does call for tea,” he said.  He put on the jacket and got up from his seat, then pointed at me.  “You’re replacing our tea, Sherlock.”  It was his Captain voice.

I involuntarily straightened my spine, then nodded absently and pulled up my feet to rest on the edge of my seat.  Once John had left the car—the refreshment service was two cars down—I waited several minutes before getting up to follow him.  John usually kept a few spare quid in the left pocket of his jacket (the same pocket, incidentally, I had placed the sheep heart in), and I was curious to see what his reaction would be when he tried to pay for the tea.

I passed through the two cars and closed the final door behind me as quietly as I could.  John was talking to the tea lady—a little older than John, artificially dyes her hair brown, originally a redhead, military widow for at least two years—and my inner alarm went off.  They were smiling a little too amiably as they made small talk, and—ah, yes, she had caught on that John was of the military brood; she had a sharp eye.  Our tea was sitting on the counter, momentarily forgotten.  I walked up behind John as if to queue.

“What can I get you, sir?” the fake-brunette said after a moment’s delay, looking over John’s shoulder with a smile.

John grabbed the two cups and began shuffling aside.  “Oh, sorry, mate, I’ll just get out of—Sherlock?” John said, as he finally looked behind him.

“John,” I said, matter-of-fact.  “I gave you my heart.”

The tea lady blinked as John said, “I thought you had it?”

“No, you do,” I replied, even as the tea lady said, “Um, are you going to pay for those?”

“Sorry, yes,” John said as he hurriedly turned back to the tea lady, set down a cup, reached into a pocket, and pulled out the sheep heart.  “It was four—?”

She instantly gasped, hand over mouth, eyes wide, and John stared at the heart in his hand with an entertaining mixture of mortification and resignation.

“Ah, yes, there it is,” I said, plucking the heart out of his hand.  “Thank you, John.  Afternoon.”  I smiled cheerily at the tea lady and turned to leave the car.

From behind me, I heard John say, “No, it’s not—it’s…never mind” followed by the sound of money being slapped onto a counter and his heavy footfalls catching up to me.

I twiddled the heart before pocketing it, smiling tightly.  John fell into step behind me.

“Tell me something,” John said.  “Do you _enjoy_ ruining my sex life?”

“I got you that date for Friday,” I objected, turning slightly to take my tea from John.

“So I can date as long as you arrange it, is that it?” he asked, sarcasm colouring the question.

“It would spare you a lot of time,” I answered.  “I could weed out all the neurotic, boring ones and draw up a list of suitable candidates if you so wi—”

“Stop,” John said.  We had reached our original car, only to have the train pull into the station at the same moment.  We stepped off, and I sipped at my tea as John said, “Please don’t tell me you’ll be chaperoning my date with Erica on Friday.”

I wrinkled my nose.  The tea was weak.  “Of course not, John.  The predictable course of _pleasantries_ and tedious small talk would be enough to send me into an early state of dementia.”

“Good to know,” John said.  “So if _that_ one’s going to be so boring, what was so wrong with the tea lady, then?”

“Well for one,” I replied, sipping at the tea again and grimacing.  “She makes a terrible cup of tea.”

John sampled his own tea and made a face.  “God, you’re right.”

We glanced at each other and chuckled, and I hailed a cab.

 

***

 

I was to face Dr. Sunyata Elliston on my own.  John had insisted that he needed to work, reminding me to ‘be careful’ and to text him with any important updates before shoving a piece of toast in his mouth and leaving.  After a shower and a shave, I made my way to the Yard.  On arriving, I found myself being unnecessarily briefed on the suspect by Lestrade.

“We’re not really sure what his deal is.  We got some psychologists trying to put together a profile for him, but beyond saying that he did it, he won’t explain why or how.”

“Because he’s stalling,” I replied.

“Don’t know why he’d bother.  He’s confessed and we’ve got evidence—he didn’t exactly hide his boots or his knives—and you already confirmed that he’d visited those farms beforehand, so it’s a done deal, motive or no motive.”  Lestrade walked me to the one-way interrogation mirror and pulled up the blinds.  I looked inside: a man in his forties, combination of Indian and Anglo ethnicity, sitting straight in his chair with hands politely folded in front of him on the table.  A neat man.  An orderly man.  His lawyer was sitting bored beside him.  Lestrade remarked, “He hasn’t been any trouble, really.  One of the nicest blokes I’ve ever arrested.  He shouldn’t give you any problems.”

I nodded absently.  “Let me in.”

“Right then.  I’ll be behind the window just in case,” Lestrade said.

Lestrade waved over a security officer, who opened the door and entered the room with me—an unnecessary but expected precaution, seeing as I wasn’t on the force.

“Dr. Elliston,” I said, holding out my hand.  “My name is Sherlock Holmes.”

Elliston looked up at me and smiled kindly.  He shook my hand—he had calluses on his palms similar to John’s; he must have specialised as a veterinary surgeon.  No wonder he excised those organs so beautifully.  “Mr. Holmes,” he said.  “How can I be of service?”

I sat down in the rickety metal chair and eyed my artfully poised Ripper.  The curved, inward slant of the shoulders suggested a relaxed submissiveness—unusual in a serial killer—and he held his hands out in the open, having nothing to hide, yet clasped in a composed, business-like manner.  He made steady, casual eye contact—a sign of active listening; he was clean-shaven, and his thick, dark hair was parted in a straight line to the right.  His accent was thoroughly BBC English, with only a ghost of Punjabi lurking in the background.  And all at once I knew that this man was not the mastermind—he had committed the four ‘false’ crop circle massacres, there was no question of that—but _he_ was the one taking orders.  His whole stature was _waiting_ for orders.

“I think we both know why I’m here, Dr. Elliston,” I said.  “I want to know who you’re following.”

Elliston smiled; it was thoroughly charming.  “You’ve figured it out, have you?  He said you might.”

“It was a good ruse, though you both must have known I would figure it out,” I acceded.

Elliston nodded.  “We didn’t want to make it too easy for you, Mr. Holmes.”

I smiled a little.  “How thoughtful.”  I placed my hands on the table and mimicked his stance.  “What is it that your employer wants from me?”

Dr. Elliston raised his eyebrows.  “Oh, no, Mr. Holmes, he’s not my employer.  I’ve no need for his money; I have—well, _had_ —”  He smiled a bit.  “—a respectable practice, until recently.  He is simply my friend.”

“So you were not motivated by money.  Interesting.  You were quick to protest the idea of him being in a position of power over you, yet you openly suggest that he is the brains in this operation.  A friend, as you say, but possibly also a relative.  A close relative, maybe a brother or a cousin.  How am I doing, doctor?” I said, holding his gaze.

Elliston sighed and shook his head.  “Very poorly, I’m afraid.”

I raised an eyebrow.  “Don’t bother lying to _me_ , doctor.  There are few people in the world that are willing to face extended incarcerations unless they are protecting a loved one.  Friendly loyalties can only carry so far.”

“You’d be surprised,” Dr. Elliston said, sending me a challenging stare.  Ah, there was the chink in the armour.

“Oh, would I?  You are certain he returns that loyalty?” I said.  It was the oldest trick in an interrogation handbook; Scotland Yard was grievously stagnating if they had missed this sort of opening.  “Has he ever faced prison for you?  A man as _clever_ as your ‘friend’ has evaded prison so far, why should he stop now?  You are certain that right now, if he were in your place, a man as _clever_ as your ‘friend’ would hesitate to save himself, rather than turn you in?  How do you _prove_ that he would do the same for you?  What evidence do you have?  That’s not something anyone can just _know_ , doctor.”

“He would do the same for me,” Elliston said calmly.  “Believe me, Mr. Holmes, he’s had the chance to turn his back on me in far worse situations than this, and he never has.  He’ll come through.”

Slight miscalculation.  He _was_ protecting a loved one.  “How sentimental.  But that still does not answer my original question,” I said.  “What does he want from me?”

“He wants nothing from you, Mr. Holmes,” the veterinarian said, almost surprised.

I frowned.  “Of course he wants something from me.  He’s _baiting_ me with these puzzles, these twists, you’ve admitted as such.  You were _expecting_ me to figure it out.  Don’t try to insult my intelligence, doctor.”

“No, Mr. Holmes.  I assure you, he wants nothing from you.  Not a thing.”  The man had the barest hint of a smile playing at the corner of his lips and a glimmer in his eye, as if he was in on some private joke.  Undoubtedly he was.  There was likely a clue hidden in his phrasing somewhere; I would need to figure it out later.  Yet it was also clear that Dr. Elliston had no intention of giving me anything _substantial_ to work with; he was far too clever at telling the truth to do that.

“Well, this has been _fun_ ,” I said tightly, returning his smile.  I got up from my chair.  “I look forward to your hearing, Dr. Elliston.”

“I would be honoured to see you there, Mr. Holmes.”  He offered his hand; I shook it.  “Oh, but weren’t you going to ask me the whys and hows and all that?” he asked, as if I had merely forgotten to pick up milk on the way home.

“Dr. Elliston, we both know you weren’t going to tell me those,” I replied, putting my hands in my pockets.

He grinned.  “No, you’re right.  My friend would be fairly cross if I took the honour from him.”

“I look forward to meeting him.”

“So does he, Mr. Holmes.”  He tilted his head to the side a little.  “But I should warn you, he’s a very persistent man.”

“So am I, doctor.”  I offered him a curt nod.  “Good afternoon.”

He tipped an imaginary hat.  “Good afternoon.”

I exited the interrogation room with the guard, ignored Lestrade’s protests to explain ‘what the hell just happened in there,’ and immediately started for the station doors, craving to return to Baker Street and _think_.  Get John to make proper tea.  Think through all the possible meanings and clues Elliston had given me, because I _knew_ they were there but there was something just a hair’s width beyond my grasp that I needed to puzzle out.  It was time to wait for the ringleader’s next move, because there would be another one coming, and I needed to be prepared for it.

I pulled out my phone and texted John.

 

* * *

 

[3] Making presumptions without complete data.  Clearly, I’d been spending too much time with the Yarders; they were having an _influence_.


	3. Experimental - Preparation of Compounds

_He wants nothing from you, Mr. Holmes.  Not a thing._

> Semantics, by definition, has three possible meanings:

  1. **the study of meaning in language** —how linguistic meaning derives from the use and interrelationships of words, phrases, and sentences, etc.  The most commonly used meaning out of the three.
  2. **the study of symbols** —investigating the relationship between a symbol and what it represents.  Would be applicable for the murderers’ obsession with crop circles.
  3. **the study of logic** —scrutinising the ways of interpreting and analysing theories of logic; relating to the conditions in which a system or theory can be said to be true.



> I have cracked coded letters countless times.  I have interpreted symbols on several occasions.  I live in logic.  By definition, therefore, I am an expert in semantics.

_He wants_

> A straightforward statement.  ‘He’ clearly represents the mastermind, ‘wants’ signifies a desire or wish for something.  The subject and verb are close together, not separated by an extraneous ‘does’ or ‘does not’ in between.  Any attempt to assert that ‘He’ is _not_ wanting is a blatant lie. 

_nothing_

> A bland attempt to negate ‘He wants’ and which would be easily accepted as such a negation by those of a lesser mind.  The significance of ‘nothing’ is that ‘He’ does not want just _any_ thing, nor does he want _some_ thing or things; he wants _a_ very specific thing, singular.

_from you, Mr. Holmes_  

> Herein lies the trick of the statement.  On the one hand, it could mean that ‘He’ wants a ‘nothing’ very specifically from me.  On the other hand, it could potentially be playing off the contrary effects of the earlier ‘nothing’ to mean that ‘He’ wants a ‘nothing’ from someone other than me—whom that other party could be is unknown.  Considering the mind of Dr. Sunyata Elliston, it seems more likely to be the former case; however, no conclusions can be drawn yet.

_Not a thing_  

> The most telling clue of them all.  It clarifies the nature of ‘nothing’ to a greater degree.  The ‘thing’ that ‘He wants’ is not a thing at all—literally “no thing.”  But what does not qualify as a ‘thing’?  Logically, there is no such thing as nothing.  However, the discriminatory nature of language dictates that there _are_ some things that do not necessarily count as ‘things’, per se, due in part either to their intangibility or to PC sensitivity: people, places, ideas, emotions.  Assumedly, what the mastermind ‘wants’ is from one of those four classifications, two of which I am incapable of actively giving from, leaving the ‘nothing’ to mean either a person or a place.  (Unless ‘revenge’ as a concept is what ‘he wants’?  He wouldn’t be the first criminal with such a motive.  Dull, dull, dull.)
> 
> Yet what person or place could this man be wanting, either from me or someone else?  I have little in terms of place—221B Baker Street.  In some distastefully _metaphorical_ way of speaking, I could have London.  Either option does not seem like much to entice a serial killer with, unless he is planning to move base to London and inflict murders there.
> 
> In terms of people, I also have little.  I have no wife, no children.  I have myself.  I have a brother, whom the serial killer would be more than welcome to have if he just said the word.  I have a mother, who is untouchable.  I have a landlady, Mrs. Hudson, and I have a friend, John.  There is not much from that pool a serial killer would draw from.

 

Such were the deductions I had formed while lying stretched out on my sofa when the door to my sitting room flew open.  I looked up to see John slamming the door behind him.  He ran a hand through his hair and then across his mouth, breathing hard.

“ _Jesus Christ,_ ” he hissed under his breath.

I sat up immediately.  “What’s wrong?”

He looked to me as if just noticing I was there.  He stepped forward, practically begging me with his eyes.  “Don’t tell him I’m here, Sherlock.  Please, whatever you do, _don’t_ let him know I’m here.”  There was the sound of the door downstairs opening.  “Oh _Christ_.”  John fled to my room and shut the door behind him with an audible click of the lock turning in place.

I remained where I was, waiting for the owner of the heavy, familiar footsteps to appear in my doorway.  A knock sounded.  When I did not reply, the door opened, and in stepped my brother Mycroft, replete with bureaucracy.

“Good evening, Sherlock,” he said.

“Mycroft.  To what do I owe the intrusion?” I replied.

Mycroft smiled thinly.  After a moment’s silence, he tapped the point of his ever-present umbrella against the floor and arched an eyebrow.  “May I sit down?  I’ve had to endure the nuisance of _legwork_ for the past hour or so.”

I smirked; John must certainly be talented to have evaded my brother’s henchmen for quite so long.  “If the chair can hold your weight,” I said.

I was rewarded with a nasty glare as Mycroft seated himself in John’s chair.  We stared at each other.  He sighed and briefly rubbed at his eyes.  “Sherlock, I have little time today to ‘beat around the bush,’ as they say.  There is a matter of inquiry that I must take up with John, and he is being particularly…uncooperative.”

“That doesn’t surprise me.  Any sensible man would know to run from you.”

Mycroft levelled me with a ‘stop messing around, Sherlock’ look, complete with an unimpressed raise of his eyebrows.  “It concerns your night in Warwick, Sherlock.”

I sighed and tilted my head back to stare at the ceiling instead; it was infinitely less annoying to look at than my brother.  “What about it?” I asked flatly.

“You might be interested to know—”

“I’m not.”

“—that when John was sleep-talking,” he continued, raising his voice slightly.

“You _bugged_ our room?” I hissed, snapping my head back down to glare at him.

“How else do you think you managed to get a room in a B-and-B that late in the evening?” Mycroft said.  “You paid for your train ticket with my credit card, Sherlock.  Of course I planned ahead for you, since you can hardly be bothered to do so yourself.”

I rolled my eyes.  Nosy busybody.

“I expect you to return that card, by the way,” he said, eyeing me.

I snorted.

He sighed.  “Fine, I’ll just have to cancel it, then.”  He pulled a data organiser out from the inner pocket of his coat and keyed in a reminder.  He replaced the organiser and folded his fingers together.  “Now where did I leave off?  Ah yes, when John was sleep-talking.”  His face did not hold any trace of his usual smug amusement when he stated, “The language he was speaking is not registered in any linguistic record, Sherlock, nor does it seem to be any sort of sleep-affected aberration of a known one.”

I blinked.

“So you can see why I was interested in having a chat with him about it,” Mycroft continued, sighing as though disappointed.  “However, he seemed to take it rather badly and consequentially fled the premises.  I’m afraid it’s not something that bodes well as far as impressions go.”  He fiddled with his umbrella handle idly.  “It is likely a fruitless thing to ask, but may I see him?”  He looked me in the eye as he said it, calculating my every reaction in the pinpoint accuracy I knew him to have.

It is difficult to determine what I was feeling in that moment.  Surprise was undoubtedly among the chief components.  There was also a certain chill in my arms that signified a touch of fear—a fear of the unknown, or more accurately, the _unknowable_ , a force I had from time to time been obliged to face in my lifetime, and which always left me with a sensation like a fish out of water when I did.  The idea that John could potentially be beyond that veil of knowledge worried me, alarmed me; that status needed to be corrected as quickly as possible.  Predominantly, though, what I felt was a tight clench in my chest and a powerful surge of energy in my veins—adrenalin, and a fierce protectiveness.

“No you may not,” I answered.

“I thought as such,” Mycroft said.  He got up from John’s chair and looked down at me.  “Sherlock, I hardly need to caution you on what this could mean, but even so, I will remind you not to behave like an ignorant child.  I expect to have answers long before the end of the week, one way or another; how I get them is a matter of your and John’s choosing.”  He stared me down to make sure I understood he was not fooling around.  “I am not only responsible for your safety, little brother,” he said.  “I’m also responsible for the safety of this nation.  I will do what is necessary to keep both of you safe if I must.”

I stood up.  “Your kingdom awaits,” I retorted, nodding toward the exit.

With a glance at my closed bedroom door, Mycroft turned and left, one heavy step following another down the steps.

I looked to the door as well.  Behind it was the friend I had known for seven years, and also the friend I hadn’t known for seven years.  By realistic standards, it is impossible for two people to know everything about each other, but I had always believed that when it came to John, I had at least known everything that mattered.  I knew how he liked his tea, that he was a skilled doctor and soldier, that he was loyal.  I knew what scared him, and I knew how to make him laugh.  I knew which of my violin pieces he liked best.  I knew he lived for excitement, and I knew where he kept his gun hidden.  I knew the brand of deodorant he wore, that he had an intense dislike for artichokes, and that he knew suspiciously a lot about crop circles.

I approached my door and knocked softly on it.

“John?”  No response.  “He’s left now.”

There was a creak as John stepped on a floorboard, and the click of the door unlocking.  John opened the door, looking straight-faced and astonishingly brave.  I imagine it was the face he wore during battle.  We stared at each other.  He knew that I knew.

He smiled humourlessly.  “Well, this wasn’t how I pictured it,” he said.

“And how did you picture it?”

“I didn’t.”  John sighed and walked past me, and I watched his every step.  He moved with ease into the sitting room, but at the last step he collapsed into his chair.  He bowed his head and buried his fingers in his hair.

I stepped into the living room and placed a hand on his shoulder, waiting for him to look up at me.  When he did, he looked a little like he first did when I met him—a man haunted, searching for something to hold him together.  I smiled.  Becoming (re)acquainted with John was starting to become a periodic event in my life; perhaps I could make the third time as charming as the first had been, and hopefully for both our sakes it would not take as long as the second time had.  I kept my tone carefully neutral and took the plunge.

“John, you never mentioned you were extraterrestrial.”

He gave one of his short, sarcastic barks of a laugh.  “When could I have mentioned that?  Not exactly ideal flatmate material, that.”

“You have a point,” I replied, giving his shoulder a quick squeeze before moving into my own chair across from him.  I scrutinised his face: he was pale with worry.  “You seem unduly concerned,” I remarked.

“Of course I’m bloody well concerned!” John snapped, the fire in his voice flaring up.  “I’ve got your brother on to me, and god knows what _he’ll_ do when he finds out for sure.”

“Mycroft knows how to keep secrets,” I assured him.  “He’s excessively good at it.  What he doesn’t like is secrets being kept from him.  I’ll talk to him.”

The tension in John’s shoulders loosened a little, but was still reluctant to leave entirely.  “I hope that’s all it is.  I’d like to avoid that whole bit where the government swoops in and experiments me to death, really.”

“Hm.”  Now there was a thought—experimenting on John.  I wonder if—

“Don’t you dare.  Don’t even think about it, Sherlock, I’m serious.”  John was pointing at me, feet braced against the floor as if to jump up.

“I have a scientific mind, John.  It is more or less a natural reflex,” I said.

He settled back with relief into his chair.  I tried to analyse if there were any physical symptoms to distinguish John as something other than human: hair was average, hands were average, knees unsuspicious.  Maybe he didn’t have a navel?

“…Sherlock,” John said.  “You’re staring at me.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t have a second head or anything, I promise.”

I shifted from scrutinising his feet to make eye contact.  “I am simply trying to understand, John,” I said quietly.

“You could just ask,” he said, mildly bemused, a nervous smile quirking his lips briefly.  His good humour was returning; that was a positive sign.

“Hm,” I replied, and mentally tallied all the questions I needed answers for in order to bring John out of the ‘unknown’ and back into the ‘known,’ where we would both be comfortable.  There were approximately sixteen of them.  I crossed a leg and touched my fingertips together, thinking about which question to ask first.

John sighed.  “This is going to be a questionnaire, isn’t it?”

“You invited it upon yourself, John.  First, what are you?”

“Um, well, colloquially I’m known as a brain slug,” he said.

I furrowed my eyebrows together.  Seventeen questions, then.  “A…what?”

“Well, I’m not _actually_ a slug.  It’s a figure of speech.  Comic book slang, that sort of thing.  We prefer to be called _voltem_.”

“Then why are you called a _brain slug_?” I asked.  Slugs were anything but brains, from my experience.

“Um…”  He scratched the back of his neck sheepishly.  “…We feed off brain waves, you see.”

My eyes widened, a vivid streak of horror cascading down my spine.

John immediately held up a placating palm.  “No, it’s not like that,” he said.  “We don’t _eat_ them, we’re just—we’re sensitive to the electrical pulses from the brain.  It’s like a shark can sense electromagnetic fields[4]...  Well, no, it’s like a plant.  A plant uses light energy from the sun to help make sugars.  We use brain waves.”

“I…see,” I said.  A realisation struck me.  “So, you’ve been…?”  I didn’t want to say ‘using me like fodder,’ because the thought alone made my chest tighten.  Instead I made a vague gesture between my skull and him.

“Yeah.”  He fidgeted and nervously licked his lips, glancing downward.  The tightness in my chest squeezed, and I sucked in a breath in an effort to puncture the hold it had on my larynx.  John looked back to me and nearly started out of his chair.  “Look, it’s not—I haven’t been hanging around because of that, all right?” he said, fixing his gaze on me, determined and steady.  “You’re my friend, Sherlock.  That always came first.  Always.”

I let out the breath I didn’t realise I was holding.  John was nearly always honest with me, and even when he wasn’t, his body language always spoke the truth for him.  “It’s fine,” I said, smiling lightly as relief flooded through my limbs.  “You’re still mine as well.”

He smiled properly for the first time since he had come home that day, and it brightened the atmosphere of the room considerably.  “Good,” he said.  “That’s…well, fantastic, really.”

I allowed the good-feeling to settle itself for another moment in our living room, warm and thick as pudding, then asked, “What do my brain waves taste like, John?”

He looked thoughtful.  “Ah, it’s a bit hard to describe.  I don’t really have taste buds for that.”  He shrugged.  “You’re a dish, I can say that much.  You’d probably be considered a delicacy among my people, what with all those gamma waves[5] spicing up the place—not everyone’s good at generating those.”

I looked to the fireplace and tried my hardest to stifle the smile burgeoning on my face.  John had unwittingly called me (well, my mind; they’re the same thing) ‘a dish,’ or in its adjectival form, ‘dishy.’  I found it to be one of the better incarnations of his usual compliments.  My face felt tellingly warm.  I cleared my throat.  “Thank you, John.”

My phone beeped.  I looked at it—a picture message from Lestrade.

I was on my feet and reaching for my coat and scarf before I could catch my breath.  The rest of my questions would have to wait.  “John!  York!”

John jumped up.  “It’s going to be one of those days, isn’t it?” he said, but he was smiling.

With a holler to Mrs. Hudson warning her not to wait up, we set off.

 

***

 

I showed John the picture of the newest crop circle on the train.  It had two entwined, curved lines coiled around a straight line, with what appeared to be wings at the top of the straight line.  The formation was enclosed in pig intestines.

“It’s a caduceus,” John said, eyebrows springing up.

“That is significant?” I asked.

“It’s the insignia of the U.S. Army Medical Corps, or at least was at some point.  And a few other med organisations across the pond.  Bit of an error on their part[6].”

“How so?” I asked, amused.

“The proper medical symbol only has one snake.  No wings, either.  Rod of some Greek bloke with a long name, the god of medicine,[7] I think.”

“Hm.”  Perhaps this one was related to the DNA-esque pattern in terms of medical interest?

“It’s genuine,” John added.

“What does it say?”

John squinted at the screen and tilted my phone ninety degrees right.  “ _I hope you bring your pet._ ”

I felt a chill run down my spine, and Dr. Elliston’s words echoed in my ear: _He wants nothing from you, Mr. Holmes.  Not a thing._

“John, could you know this man?”

John shrugged, handing me back my phone.  “Dunno.  I’ve met a lot of blokes over the years.  Chances are that even if I knew him once, I wouldn’t remember him.”

That…was an odd answer.  John wasn’t so old that he’d actually _forget_ people that he knew, if he’d known them well enough to garner this level of involvement; he might not be able to _identify_ them, but surely he wouldn’t forget them entirely…or was he that old?  “How old are you, John?” I asked.

He raised an eyebrow.  “You want the real answer?” he replied, eyes sparking a little with amusement.

“Yes.”

“One hundred and forty-eight,” he whispered, eyes briefly checking the car for anyone listening in too closely.

“Impossible,” I whispered back, leaning my head a little closer so we wouldn’t have to keep our voices down so much.

“Not really,” he murmured.  “My people live up to two hundred years, or thereabouts.”

I stared at him.  He had a few gray hairs here and there; the lines on his face seemed a lot more significant now.  “You’re the youngest centenarian I’ve ever seen,” I said.

“Oh, well, I try to keep active.  I’ve got this crazy flatmate who makes me run up and down London all the time; he keeps me in shape.”

I smiled.  John was proving to be more surprising as the case progressed, and infinitely more distracting now that my head buzzed with unasked questions needing answers.  Now was as good a time as ever, I supposed.  “How long have you been here—Earth, that is?”

He furrowed his eyebrows and tapped a finger to his lips, calculating.  “Since 1885, I think,” he replied.  “I was pretty young at the time.”

I raised an eyebrow.  “That long?”  To think John had had to put up with _telegraphs_ and _horse carriages_ and nineteenth century London pollution—what a tediously _slow_ time that would have been.  “I’m surprised you didn’t die of boredom.”

“Things got a lot more interesting when telly was invented,” John retorted.  “Besides, I like it here.”

“Hm, I suppose at times it has its merits,” I agreed, twiddling my phone in the air.  I caught the device and regarded the caduceus etched in grain and animal blood.  My original hypothesis about the potentially symbolic nature of the crop circles needed reviewing.  John and Dr. Sunyata Elliston seemed to have disproven the idea that the patterns were meaningless: John could read messages in the genuine ones, and Dr. Elliston was far too intelligent to construct time-consuming patterns unless the patterns themselves served a higher purpose.

“What is the link?” I thought aloud.  “Triangles, circles, DNA, skull-and-bones, a compass rose, and a caduceus.  The ‘genuine’ ones seem connected by medicine and biological study, but what of the rest?”

“Oh,” said John, eyes widening.

“What?” I urged, when John seemed to have fallen into a stunned stupor.

“I just remembered,” he said.  “The caduceus—it’s also a symbol of Mercury.[8]”

Interesting—that possibly linked it with the compass rose pattern.  But to what purpose?  “Good, John,” I said.  “Anything else?”

He shook his head.  “That’s all I got at the moment.”

I sighed.  “Perhaps the site will offer more evidence to work with.”

I fell to gazing out the window while John idly checked his IrisNet updates (“That Sinclair guy is declaring tomorrow Abduction Feast Day.  I’m almost tempted to join this church; it sounds like they’re eating all the time.”  “Perhaps you should, John.  I hear there are benefits to being worshipped.”).  What was the _motive_ of this mastermind?  My strongest suspicion and admittedly the hypothesis most strongly supported by evidence was that the man sought something intangible from either myself or John: speaking with Dr. Elliston had confirmed that the pair of them were expecting our involvement in this case, and the two ‘genuine’ crop circle patterns were designs that could be relevant to John’s medical profession on some level—furthermore, the newest pattern had a ‘message’ clearly directed at us.  The recent discovery on my part of John’s extraterrestrial origins and the emergence of these crop circles was too uncanny to be unrelated or coincidental; it is possible that these murderers also knew about John.  Yet what fact about John, his alien nature included, could prompt a man (possibly another alien) to slaughter ten percent of a stranger’s livestock and strew it around a crop circle on multiple occasions?

I studied John’s reflection in the window.  John suppressed a yawn with one hand, scrolling through messages on his phone in the other.  Perhaps he was feeding off my active brain waves even at that moment (Was it an unconscious thing?  Did he have to think about doing it?  I would have to ask later.).  Yet even so, he looked like an average bloke at a cursory glance.  One hundred and thirty-two years of life on Earth had made him into a seamless citizen of the human race; it is little wonder that it took me years to suspect that John had something especially unusual (for John was a little unusual to begin with) about him.  He’d had more than a century to learn how to hide in plain sight—he was human by habit.

But there was a time—a lot more time than I had originally thought—when I did not know John.  I could make educated guesses about his childhood and young adulthood from some of his habits, but even I had my limits.  People, and aliens presumably, change over time: fifty or a hundred years ago, John was a different person.  It was feasible that something happened back then to induce the events we faced at that present.

It was worrying, to some extent.  Although there was never a doubt in my mind that John could defend himself (or that I could defend myself, or that John could defend me, etc), the fact that I could not determine what this foe _wanted_ left me unsure of what to expect or prepare for.  I sighed, closed my eyes, and opened them again to notice that the sun had long since set outside, and we were not even in York yet.  I scowled, pondering if I could get all I needed from the site by torchlight or if I should wait for daylight.

“John, do you have work tomorrow?” I asked.

“Nope,” he replied.

“Good.”

No reason I couldn’t do both, then.  There was the problem of lodging, though, and renting a car to get to the outlying farm at this hour would be difficult.  I sighed, pulled out my phone, and begrudgingly texted my brother.

_John’s an alien.  Leave off him.  SH_

I had said I would talk to Mycroft about that, after all.  The response was swift, as expected.

_I suspected so.  MH_

_Though you must realise I can hardly just leave my inquiry at that, Sherlock.  MH_

_Piss off.  SH_

_He’s a potential threat to national security, brother mine.  I cannot just ‘leave off.’  MH_

_John is a decorated veteran of Her Majesty’s forces, Mycroft.  So piss off.  SH_

_A commendable potential threat, then.  MH_

I sighed.  Mycroft could be unbearably stubborn at times.

“Who’re you texting?” John asked.  “You look like you’re swallowing cough syrup.”

“Mycroft.”

“Oh.”

I glanced at him from the corner of my eye.  A small line had appeared between his eyebrows—a touch of strain or worry.

“Tell him I said ‘piss off,’” John said.

“Gladly.”

_John says ‘piss off.’  SH_

There was a pause before the reply, and I imagine Mycroft had sighed rather audibly.

_Will you two act like grown-ups for once?  MH_

I showed John the text, and he giggled.  Not worried anymore, then—though it would be better if he didn’t have to worry at all; his concerns could be distracting.  Despite what I had told John earlier concerning Mycroft, his fears were not unfounded; I would not put it past my brother to place the government over my companion’s well-being.

_Don’t kidnap him for government experimentation, Mycroft.  It worried him.  SH_

_Experimentation is more your area, Sherlock.  MH_

_Or tortured interrogation.  SH_

_I am sure that would be unnecessary.  MH_

_Or for extended containment and observation.  SH_

_He would be well cared for.  MH_

_Promise me you won’t take him.  SH_

There was a long pause as I waited for his reply.  I frowned.  It was necessary to gain Mycroft’s word as a gentleman that he would not bring harm to John; my brother was one of the most powerful men in England, capable of harnessing all kinds of forces to his assistance, and his word was one of the few means I had available to exert influence over him.  Mycroft’s word was as good as legally binding.  It was time to pull out my trump card, though it pained me to know Mycroft would revel in it.

_Please.  SH_

_I promise, Sherlock.  MH_

I exhaled with relief.  But just to make sure…

_The whole thing, Mycroft.  SH_

_I promise not to kidnap John for government experimentation, tortured interrogation, or extended containment and observation.  Happy?  MH_

_‘Or for any other procedure that could bring harm to his person or mental state.’  SH_

_Or for any other procedure that could bring harm to his person or mental state.  Happy?  MH_

_I also need overnight lodging in York and a rental car.  SH_

_Of course you do.  MH_

_Don’t bug the room.  SH_

_Why?  Are we expecting indecorous events this evening?  MH_

_Piss off.  SH_

I put the phone away and looked to John, who was watching me.

“It’s been settled,” I said.

“Thanks,” he replied.  The tension in his shoulders seemed to recede at last.

The train was starting to pull into the station.

“Up for a crime scene?” I asked with a smile.

“Oh, always.”

* * *

  
[4] He seems to have been referring to a shark’s ampullae of Lorenzini: electroreceptor organs used to detect the electromagnetic fields that all living things produce; named after Stefano Lorenzini, who described the organs in his _Osservazioni intorno alle Torpedini_ (1678).

[5] High-frequency (between 25-100 Hz) neural oscillations that have been theorized to be associated with intense concentration such as that found in meditation masters, in which the brain is put in a state of maximum sensitivity.  The following study observed the neural oscillations in Tibetan Buddhist monks and noted that the masters were able to attain gamma waves during intense meditation, whereas novices produced scant instances of gamma wave activity but attained greater instances over time and practice:  [Lutz A., Greischar L.L., Rawlings N.B., Ricard M., Davidson R.J. (2004). "Long-term meditators self-induce high amplitude gamma synchrony during mental practice."  _Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA_ 101: 16369–16373. ] It is therefore unsurprising that I have become expert at generating them with all my practice in mental concentration (according to John’s senses).

[6] However, it seems that most professional health care associations in America have corrected this error – a study found that 62% of professional health care associations use the correct symbol of the Rod of Asclepius; on the other hand, 76% of _commercial_ healthcare organisations used the caduceus symbol [Friedlander, Walter J (1992). _The Golden Wand of Medicine: a history of the caduceus symbol in medicine_. Greenwood Press].  The difference suggests that professional associations would have a better understanding of the two symbols, whereas the commercial organisations are more concerned with the visual impact the image would have in selling products.  Perhaps if I had noted this nuance at the time, the case would have been solved faster.

[7] The Rod of Asclepius; according to Stephen Lock, John M. Last, and George Dunea in _The Oxford Illustrated Companion To Medicine_ (2001), "In early statues of Asclepius the rod and serpent were represented separately" and over time the cult of Asclepius combined the symbols into one insignia.  The snake of the symbol is actually _Zamenis longissimus_ (colloquially called “Aesculapian Snakes”), a non-venomous snake native to Europe that was often used in healing rituals and crawled freely among dormitories of the sick and injured in Greek healing temples (asclepeions).  The benign nature of this symbol, in direct contrast to the caduceus, should have alerted me to the killer’s intentions.

[8] Thus also has historical connotations of commerce, theft, deception, eloquence, negotiation, and death.  [Engle, Bernice (Dec 1929). "The Use of Mercury's Caduceus as a Medical Emblem". _The Classical Journal_ 25 (1): 205.]  Should have caught this _then_.  _Stupid_.


	4. Experimental - Instrumentation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **A/N** : Since it will no longer spoil the fic (though I expect most of you saw it coming from a gazillion miles away), I can now tell you that this whole thing was inspired by [one lonely prompt on the kink meme](http://sherlockbbc-fic.livejournal.com/12432.html?thread=63822224#t63822224). I haven't added a link on there yet, mostly because I want to avoid giving my entire hand away to any unsuspecting readers who find this on AO3 while it's in progress, but I'll link it once it's complete. (If I forget to, remind me.)
> 
>  **Warnings** : Watch your step.

We were fortunate that the moon was full that night and that the sky was devoid of clouds.  John and I crept up to the farmhouse in our vehicle and pulled off about 500 metres away from it, getting out to walk our way into the fields.  The moonlight was ample, negating the need for a torch to guide us through the wheat, but the wind was brisk.  I pulled the collar of my coat up; John breathed on his hands and stuffed them in his jacket pockets.

There was yellow tape surrounding the site, and I idly pulled it up and stepped under it, holding it up for John as he also stepped under.  The site, of course, looked different in the night compared to the daytime photo: the silvery sheen of the flowing wheat was in stark contrast to the dark, flattened wheat of the pattern.  The trail of pig innards looked merely like dark rocks; any bloodstains on the ground or the wheat blended in too easily with shadows.  The stench of slaughter gave away the disguise, but even so, the entire formation looked like a forbidding brand mark on the earth.

I squatted down to get a better look at the ground as best I could with the moonlight.  I noticed something peculiar immediately, and I fished out my pocket torch to double check.  Shining my light across the dirt, the ground looked smooth.

“John,” I whispered.  “There are no prints.  No hoof marks, no shoe prints, tyre marks, nothing.”

John squatted down beside me, looking.  “You’re right,” he said.  “It looks untouched.”

“How is that possible?” I hissed.

“Spaceship?” John offered.  “You know, with one of those…hover-things.  Maybe he hovered the pig parts into place?”

I looked at John.  “… _Hover-things_ , John?  Are you an alien or aren’t you?”

“I’m a doctor, Sherlock, not a space pilot,” John retorted.

I sighed.  “Fine, let’s say he… _hovered_ …everything into place, the pattern and the innards.  But that doesn’t explain how he got all these pigs to keep quiet during all of this, does it?”

John frowned.  “No, I guess not.  We probably can’t count on having two vets in a row, either.”

“It is unlikely,” I agreed.  “But I wouldn’t rule it out just yet without evidence.”  I stood up and turned 360 degrees, examining.  “He also took the husks with him,” I commented.

John stood up and breathed on his hands again, replacing them in his pockets.  “Wonder what he’d want with a couple dozen pig skins?”

“Trophies, perhaps,” I contemplated.  “Doubtful they are for rugby balls.  Maybe for experiments.”  I gestured to the crop circle formation.  “Is there any input for you to add, John?”

John looked down at the wheat, shrugged, then looked up at the stars.  He shook his head.  “Nothing I haven’t told you before,” he said.  He continued gazing upwards, and the harsh whiteness of the moon seemed at odds with his skin; in this light, John was shaded into a monochromatic picture of solitude.  He looked better in sunlight.

I looked up at the sky as well, and the thousand stars glittered like so many pearls on a mollusc’s mantle.  “Which one is yours?” I asked.

“That one,” he answered without hesitation, pointing somewhere left.  “You see that one next to the big show-off star?”

“No,” I said, because honestly they all looked the same to me.

He stepped closer, standing just a little in front of me, and pointed again.  “Okay, you see it now?  It’s not that big.”

“No.”

“Just look where I’m pointing.”

“I’m looking, John.  I can’t see which one it is.”

“Oh for god’s sake, it’s _right_ —no, look, here, put your head on my shoulder.”

“Why?” I asked, eyebrows furrowed.

“Because you’re too bloody tall for me to put _my_ head on _your_ shoulder, and it’ll get our sightlines aligned.”

I obliged, leaning over to rest my chin on John’s shoulder.  The warmth radiating from the side of his face, neck, and shoulder seemed a comfort, somehow; I am sure if violins had a sense of touch, they would understand the same feelings conjured from that warmth—security, belonging, the affection reserved for a familiar player.  John pointed upwards with the same arm I rested my chin upon.

“Okay, you see that really bright one?” he said.

I did see it; it aligned perfectly with his outstretched finger.  It was bright enough, I supposed.  “Yes,” I answered.

“Okay.  Well it’s not that one.”  He shifted his finger slightly right.  “It’s _that_ one.”

Compared to the former star, this one was a mere pinprick in the sky, but I saw it.  I filed it away in my mind: John Watson came from there.  It was one more step to bringing John out of the ‘unknown.’

“Do you see it?” he asked.

“Yes,” I answered.  “It’s beautiful, John.”

He lowered his arm and my peripherals spotted his cheeks stretching in a smile.  “Thanks,” he said, close to a whisper.

I gazed at the little star for a minute longer, trying as best as I could to memorise where it was.  After several moments of trying to create a recognisable pattern of stars in the sky so that I could find it again, I realised that I would have an easier time if I just asked John to point it out whenever I required it.  He was apparently the expert on this subject, after all.  Furthermore I was just beginning to understand why people considered ‘a shoulder to lean on’ a gratifying thing to have.  If John’s shoulder was any measure near the norm, it was no surprise the term was coined.

He fidgeted.  “You can move at any time,” he offered.

I reluctantly moved away and straightened up again.  “Do you still have the sealable bags?” I asked.

He turned around, frowning.  “No.  I’m not your packhorse, Sherlock.”

I scowled.  “We’ll get them in the morning, then.”

Suddenly a light came on from the farmhouse, and a door opened, the farmer silhouetted in the opening.  He gave a harsh shout.

John and I bolted to the car.  By the time we got in and roared off, we were giggling helplessly.  Undoubtedly a police escort would be necessary in the morning.

 

***

 

John fluffed a pillow and then seemed to meld with it, his nose disappearing somewhere in the white fabric.  He groaned softly.  “I just remembered how little sleep I’ve been running on,” he said, muffled by the pillow.  A bleary blue eye opened slightly and stared at me.  “I don’t understand how you do it.”

“Practice,” I replied, then resumed thinking.

How did one commit a crime outdoors without leaving a footprint of some kind?  Some might posit putting pillowcases over shoes, but it would still leave an impression of _something_ having stepped there—pillowcases do not negate the effect of gravity.  Stilts would defy a footprint, but they would still leave a noteworthy mark.  The morning would bring clearer results—there was a chance something could turn up—but, for the moment, what remained were two options: John’s UFO theory, or the murderer standing some distance away and flinging pig organs as if they were discuses.

“You’ve been taking this rather well,” John said, apropos of nothing.  “I’m a bit surprised.”

“Hm?” I said, surprised that John was still awake.  I’d assumed he’d fallen asleep.

“The alien thing,” he replied.  “You’re taking it well.  A bit too well, really.”

I frowned slightly.  “I do not dispute with facts, John.  You are an alien.  Why should that be distressing?”

“Well, I guess most people would be a bit put-off that their worldview’s changed.  Or, I dunno, at least excited to know they’re not alone in the universe or something.”

“It is useless to bother with philosophical questions; they do not have answers.  My worldview is how the world presents itself, John.  Facts tell me that water at room temperature is a liquid, and facts tell me you are an alien.  So be it.”  I glanced at him from the corner of my eye.  John was on his side, one arm propping up his head, sending me a sceptically raised eyebrow.  I lifted my eyes to the ceiling and sighed.  “The only thing that ‘bothers’ me, John, is that I don’t have _enough_ facts about you.  It is akin to a cartographer finding out that he missed an entire continent when he was mapping the world, and the continent was right under his nose.  It is embarrassing.”

“It hurts your pride.”

“Yes,” I snapped.  Damn the man, he was grinning like a smug…a smug something.

“Well, it was probably about time that know-all attitude of yours took a hit for once,” he said.

I glared.  “Yes, thank you, John.  Most helpful.”

He snickered and flopped onto his back, closing his eyes.  “If it helps,” he said a moment later.  “I’m still open to questions.”

Question eight popped into my mind instantly.  “Do you have a navel?”

He blinked his eyes open, eyebrows furrowed in confusion.  “Sorry?”

“A navel.  Do you have one?” I repeated.

“…Yeah,” he said, confused.

“May I see it?”

He shrugged and lifted up his shirt a bit.  Sure enough, the small dip was there.  I placed my hand on his stomach—John jumped a little—and briefly ran my thumb over the hollow.  It seemed real enough.  I took my hand away.  “Born of woman, then,” I commented.

“Um, yeah,” he said, pulling down his shirt with needless haste.  “Was that really necessary?”

“I am trying to determine if you have any distinguishing external features to mark you as inhuman,” I stated.  “Without seeming rude,” I added.

“Oh,” he said.  “Well, I was referring to touching my stomach.  That was a bit rude.”

“Was it?”

“A bit.  Your hands are cold.”

“Oh,” I said.  I looked away, and my eyes settled on my coat resting on a nearby chair.  I got up from the bed and walked to it, reached into a pocket, and pulled out my gloves.  Putting them on, I turned back to John and held them up for him to see.  “Better?” I asked.

John’s eyebrows were knit together, but he looked amused.  “Er…sort of,” he said.  “I don’t think you’ll find anything interesting that way, though.”

I sighed, yanked off my gloves, and tossed them in the chair.  I returned to the bed and flopped on it.  “Really, John, what’s the point of being an alien if you’re going to be absolutely dull about it?”

“Sorry,” he said, chuckling.  “The best I’ve got is a nictitating membrane.”

“Really?” I said, sitting up instantly.  A jolt of excitement pumped through my arteries.  “A third eyelid?  May I see it?”

He sighed and sat up as well, and we faced each other.  “Sure, why not; just don’t try to touch it or something,” he said.  He opened his eyes a bit wider.  “Watch carefully.  It goes by pretty quick, and it’s pretty transparent, too.”

I watched.  For a split second, I thought I saw a slight movement cross horizontally over John’s eyes.  “Do it again,” I commanded, squinting and leaning a bit closer.  He obliged, but I still only saw a flicker of movement, not the membrane itself.  I reached up and tilted his chin a little left, so that his face caught the light of the bedside lamp more clearly.  I stared, determined not to blink and miss it.  “Once more.”

There it was!  For only a second, but I saw the thin, clear tissues slide across John’s eyes.  Of course, I couldn’t touch them, but I imagined they would be delicate, like dragonfly wings, and perhaps just as elegant and iridescent when studied under a microscopic lens.  “Fascinating,” I murmured.

“Um,” John said.

I blinked, realising that I still held his chin in my hand.  I let go and pulled away, straightening up once again.  “Sorry,” I said.  “Was my hand cold?”

“Uh, something like that,” he mumbled, wetting his lips and blinking rapidly.  He looked at me, huffed one of his odd little half-laughs, and looked away, touching his chin while shaking his head.  “ _Incredible_ ,” he muttered under his breath.

I furrowed my eyebrows together.  That was John’s mildly embarrassed reaction, the kind he made when he was trying to look sarcastic rather than embarrassed.  It was not an expression I was witness to very often—the two clear instances I can recall were in the context of the case involving The Woman, both in a reference to me, though spoken by her.  Curious.  I had assumed it was something in the personal effect she seemed to have on people.

“John,” I said.  “There’s nothing to be embarrassed about.”

“Nope,” he agreed, albeit flippantly.  “Not a thing.”

 _He wants nothing from you, Mr. Holmes.  Not a thing._   I blinked, momentarily sidelined by Elliston’s words surfacing from my peripheral consciousness.  Things that were not things: people, places, ideas, emotions.  What the murderers wanted was still unclear—myself, John, or some unknown third factor.  As for John, the not-things he could be embarrassed about:

 

> **people** – himself, or me (both?)
> 
> **places** – unlikely
> 
> **ideas** – possible, unclear what ideas
> 
> **emotions** – embarrassed about embarrassment?  Corollary: requires knowledge of source of original embarrassment; loop back to beginning for inquiry, loop, loop, looping, endless looping—ABORT!

 

“You okay?” John said warily.  “You suddenly got this weird look on your face.”

“I’m fine,” I said, abandoning that unintentional mind-trap for the moment.  “Why do you have those?” I asked instead, gesturing to his eyes.

He scratched his temple.  “It’s sandy on my planet.  We evolved with extra eye protection, bit like a camel.[9]  Though I suppose if I had to swim underwater it could be useful there, too.”

“Practical,” I said approvingly.  “A design elegant in its simplicity.”

He smiled.  “Ta.”  There was a beat as John rubbed at his knee with his thumb, then said, “You know, it’s nice, this.”  I raised an eyebrow.  “I don’t get the chance to talk about it much, the alien thing,” he elaborated.  “I’ve hidden it so long, it’s like I forgot it was there.”

I nodded.  “Have you ever told anyone else?”

At that, his face seemed to soften, and his eyes seemed gentler, somehow.  “A long time ago,” he said, his tone tellingly wistful.

Oh, _stupid_ , of course he’d had a wife; the man was over a hundred years old, with an intact libido if his string of dates over the years had anything to say about it.  The fact was inevitable.  I shouldn’t have been surprised.

John began tugging at the thin chain that still held his army ID tags around his neck, smirking.  “John—two, Sherlock—zero,” he teased, pulling up the clutch of tags at last—which also had a small, simple, yet very obviously antique locket dangling alongside them.  He gently opened it with a fingernail, smiled at the picture within, then held it out to me.  “There she is, my Mary.”

I carefully took the locket from him—it was still strung around his neck; we shuffled closer to loosen the chain—and examined.  Silver oval casing, well polished and cared for, with an ivy motif engraved on the front and back.  A very tiny mark of an anchor on the outside rim, near the bottom on the back—the maker’s mark.  Inside, on the left side, was an exceptionally old picture of John—monochrome, formal suit with bowtie, an amusingly unfitting set of whiskers, and a face with significantly fewer age lines.  On the right was his wife, a delicate heart-shaped face with very solemn eyes.  A sharp widow’s peak.  Hair was curly, but done up tight enough to escape immediate notice—a person accustomed to working in the background, where physical recognition was not a favourable employment trait.  Attire was dark, formal, yet ascetically simple—not very high in social class—however, a stunning necklace hung from her neck—a windfall of wealth, perhaps.

“A governess, John.  I should have expected.”

“Right,” he said.

“She came into money unexpectedly.  Inheritance from a long-lost relative, perhaps.”

“Right again.”

I glanced over the whole of the locket-piece once more.  “Circa early 1900s.  Not very pricey; you were a frugal couple,” I concluded.

“Right on all counts.”

I handed him back his locket, and he gazed at her picture fondly, a touch of nostalgia making the corner of his mouth lift slightly.  I felt a strange stretch of muscle in my chest at the sight, as if my ribcage were a jaw gaping wide, trying to swallow something whole.  A...craving.

“She was sharp as a tack, my Mary,” he said after a moment.  “I couldn’t hide a thing from her.”  He glanced at me.  “You two probably would’ve gotten on.”  He replaced the locket and ID tags under his shirt.

“You loved her,” I said.  It seemed like the thing I was supposed to say.

“I did,” he nodded.  “Still do, really.”

“What happened?” I asked.  Not that the answer wasn’t obvious, but seeing John with that new, unfamiliar, soft expression was endearing somehow, a look that suited him well.  He wore the bearing of a married man as a monarch held the nuance of royalty; in my experience, it was a mien that few other men could carry successfully.  I could not look away from it.

He closed his eyes, for just a second.  “She died.”  He opened them again, looked at me.  “Spanish flu.[10]”

I nodded.  For a moment I debated whether I should put my hand on his shoulder or simply express my condolences.  I settled for both—couldn’t go wrong with that, surely.  “That must have been…difficult,” I tried.  It didn’t sound quite right, but I was making an effort.

Thankfully, John seemed to recognise my good intentions.  He patted my hand on his shoulder.  “It was, but…I guess I’ve been lucky.  I had my Mary for twenty years, survived a few wars…”  He gazed at me, smiled a bit.  “…and not everyone gets a friend back from the dead.”

The affection in his eyes (those too-wonderful alien eyes) was a warm beacon, a glow he’d cast on the memory of his wife, now reflected in turn upon me.  A spotlight.  I couldn’t remember ever meeting such a gaze before.  It left my throat dry, made me wet my lips.  Suddenly the heat of John’s shoulder against my palm felt more pronounced somehow, with his own hand still placed over mine, warming my knuckles.

Then his hand shifted and travelled just above my wrist, two fingers at my pulse.  His eyes flickered to the watch on his wrist, studied the second hand ticking for a moment, then returned to fix on me.  “It seems a bit fast for you,” he murmured.

“It’s,” I said, and then forgot what the rest of it was I was going to say.  I’d caught a glimpse of that clear tissue crossing John’s eyes, and I swear it shimmered; he was staring at me intently now, refusing to blink.  His Adam’s apple bobbed as he gulped.  I felt his hand at my neck, his thumb just below my ear.  I swallowed.  I raised my other hand to his jaw; my hand shook.

“John,” I said.  It sounded hoarse.  His eyes sparked.  I swallowed again, tried to speak softer, “Can you read my mind?”

“Only if you want me to.”

A light pressure of his fingertips against my neck.  The touch seemed to click something together, and my mind conjured up the clues I’d been overlooking or ignoring or misinterpreting somehow: the hitch of his breath when I’d touched his stomach, that embarrassed huff, the beats and pauses after any fleeting touch I’d given him—and surely my own subconscious must have figured it out before I did, in that slight but earnest _I need you_ I’d sent him, in knowing that John couldn’t resist that text.  He’d been waiting for years.  The burn in his eyes said it plain as day.  I swallowed again, the dryness and thirst in my throat waiting to be quenched or kindled, I couldn’t tell.  Leaning forward, we met somewhere in the middle.

 

* * *

   
[9] Although more commonly found in reptiles, fish, and birds, some mammals have full nictitating membranes (most mammals only have a vestigial portion); camels are one species that have this feature, along with polar bears, seals, aardvarks, and beavers.  I’ve since reclassified John among the Even More Interesting Mammals.

[10] Which sets Mary Watson’s death somewhere between January 1918 and December 1920, and assumedly she was young and strong in health.  Although most flu outbreaks kill juvenile, elderly, or already weakened patients, the 1918 pandemic killed predominantly healthy adults: modern research has concluded that the virus killed through a cytokine storm (overreaction of the body’s immune system), leading the stronger immune systems of the healthy adults to act against them. [Barry, J. M. (2004). _The great influenza: the epic story of the deadliest plague in history_. New York: Viking.]


	5. Experimental - Hazards

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **A/N** : I just realized that my middle chapter ended with the word "middle." HEEHEEHEEHEEHEE. I love serendipity.

I wish I could say that I had a lot on my mind at that moment.  But there was not a thing.  There was John, here, how lovely his lips felt, a torrent of affection rushing through some internal floodgate.  Us, brushing our mouths together as though sneaking discreet touches in a crowded room.  His fingers in my hair, mine curled at the nape of his neck.  The light scent of his aftershave from the morning mixed with his skin.  A wisp of stubble grazed against my chin.  The consuming desire to know the spaces still infuriatingly _blank_ in this continent of a man hit me like dengue fever, heated and sore, because _not_ knowing was no longer acceptable.  When we broke apart with a sigh, the warm breath of his mouth against my lips felt like a lingering, humid caress.

His eyes were half-lidded when I opened mine, and he smiled.  He tapped our foreheads together.  “We’ve been right idiots, haven’t we, Sherlock?”

“Mm,” I said, mind whirring, screeching.  “It took you long enough, John.”

“ _Me_ long enough?” John objected.  “Says the man who’s been sabotaging my dates for seven years and who doesn’t even realise when he’s accidentally flirting with me.”

“ _Fine_.  _Us_ long enough, then,” I compromised.

“Us,” he agreed.

His fingers drifted from my hair back to my neck, resting against my pulse.  I felt the artery flutter against his touch.  I closed my eyes and breathed heavily through my nose.  The need to focus on The Work was thrumming through my mind, a constant beat rising into a percussive clashing.  The fixation on John was coursing like pandemic across my cerebral cortex.

A spark ignited.

Inflammation spread, hot and angry.

I wrenched his hands away from my skin and leaned back, squeezing my eyes shut, head pounding.

“Sherlock?  Sherlock, what’s wrong?”

“I can’t.”

I felt the touch of his hand on my wrist again and I got off the bed, heading straight for the window.  I ripped the curtain to the side and pressed my forehead against the cool glass.

“Sherlock.”  The bedsprings creaked as John got off the bed and stepped towards me.  “Sherlock, talk to me.  What did I do wrong?”  His voice was even, steady, but there was just the barest hint of worry layered underneath.

His hand touched my shoulder; I flinched and felt my heartbeat stutter.

“ _Don’t_ ,” I said.

The hand left immediately.  “All right.  Okay.”

I fixed my eyes on the streetlight outside and tried to focus on it, to ignore John’s presence hovering just behind me.  It was impossible.

John sighed, and there was a light shuffle as he shifted his weight from one foot to the other.  “Sherlock, if...look, a second ago you seemed more than fine with this.  If you’ve changed your mind, well...well, did you?  Change it?”

‘ _Should_ I change it?’ would have been a more appropriate question.  It wouldn’t have been too late to reverse the action.  We could have passed it off as a fluke, stirred on by sentimental talk of _auld lang syne_.  But would it have been possible to do that then?  Perhaps the better question would have been ‘ _Could_ I change it?’  A sensation like a cold fist gripping my insides seized me in that moment—could that door I’d firmly kept under lock and key in my mind, that door now kicked open and flooding a veritable Pandora’s Box of emotional imps throughout my cerebral cortex, be shut again at my command?  If I were to solve the case at hand, it would need to be.  It would _have_ to be.

I lifted my forehead off the window and studied John’s reflection.  The lines in his face looked far more pronounced in the night’s shadows, but I could see the bright shine of his eyes fixed upon me.  A twinge reverberated from my brain into my chest, like a fault line threatening to crack open.

“I need to think, John,” I replied.

“Sherlock, please, I just want an answer.”

“You have one,” I snapped.

His reflected image straightened its posture.  His eyes looked profoundly hurt.

“Please,” I added, softly.

I watched him watch me, saw him nod to himself, and heard him say, “Good night, Sherlock.”  He continued to stand, watching me, and I realised that he had caught my gaze in the reflection.

“Sleep well, John,” I replied.  At last, he turned away and moved back to the bed, settling himself in as the springs creaked.  He glanced at me once more before turning on his side away from me.  His hand fumbled blindly for the switch to the lamp before turning it off.  The room leapt into darkness.  I rested my head against the window once more and attempted to think.  I could tell John was not asleep yet—his breathing was too loud, too quick.  

I was remembering the reason why I had chosen to place myself in a self-enforced celibacy for the vast majority of my career.  If John had been distracting _before_ this evening, it was no comparison to the distraction he created _now_.  Now, it seemed a John-themed roadblock was around the bend of every path of productive thought.  Oh, they were _pleasant_ roadblocks, sure enough—here, a sudden rockslide of John’s lips; there, a bridge flooded by an overflowing river of John’s aftershave; and we can’t forget the entire motorway now under construction by John’s eyes, likely deconstructing it into a park or something equally unhelpful.  As exciting as these roadblocks were, they were still roadblocks all the same, forcing me to try to find a safe detour where I wouldn’t get jumped by John-shaped highwaymen and dragged off into the proverbial forest, never to be seen again.

Navigating through this maze of thought, I resurfaced to the present and noted that the moon had shifted considerably—perhaps two hours had passed.  I glanced at my companion (partner?  _inamorato_?  What would we call each other now?  Dear god, that was a hidden sinkhole that I had to crawl my way out from) to see if he had fallen asleep yet.  He had.  I let out the sigh of frustration I’d been holding in.  It was truly an inconvenient time to realise I had fallen in love with the man.  

For that’s what it was, simply.  To deny the reality of the situation would be unwise.  But for _god’s sake_ , I was _working_.  I could not risk distraction.  Distraction leads to error, and error was not something I could afford with opponents like Dr. Elliston and his mysterious associate.  I sighed again and considered facing the wrath of Unexpectedly Awakened John in order to take a midnight stroll through the gates of York; it could clear my head of the highwaymen-Johns taunting me from the shadows of my subconscious.  I took a creaky step towards the door when John made an incoherent mumbling noise.  I froze, studied his face.  I took another step.

“Git, get back in bed,” said John.

I scrutinised his face and the rise and fall of his chest.  He was still asleep.

“John?” I said quietly.  When he didn’t respond, I took a few more steps and managed to turn the handle of the door.

“Cancel that order,” said John.  “I’ll go bloody barefoot.  Fucking snipe won’t escape me this time.”

It seemed Subconscious John had chosen to make another appearance.  There were two options I could follow: on the one hand, I could still sneak out—it is more difficult to wake John during slow-wave sleep, so it would be feasible; on the other hand, I could see if Subconscious John would be more willing to help with the case this time.  Perhaps his subconscious would yield more helpful results than his conscious self could, considering the situation we’d stumbled into.

“Fuck snowshoes...they’ll only slow me down,” John snarled.

I smiled.  It wouldn’t hurt to see what happened; in any case, the parasomnia episodes were usually short, and I could escape in that brief interlude between when it ended and when the lighter sleep stage began.  I carefully approached the bed and stood beside it.  John sighed contentedly.

“John,” I said again.  “Can you hear me?”

“...Yeah.”

“What do you think of the crop circles?” I asked.  Perhaps with our new findings, he’d have a better impression this time around.

John frowned, not replying.  He mumbled something in that strange, other language.

“It’s all right, John.  I know about you already,” I reminded him.

“Nosy git,” he replied.  “Your face is so damn lickable.”

I felt an odd warmth in my cheeks.  Perhaps it had been a bad idea to engage his subconscious.  I needed to steer him away from that train of thought.  “Thank you, John.  The crop circles,” I urged gently.

“...Fucking _weird_ ,” he hissed after a moment.

I sighed.  “Be more astute, John,” I muttered.  “ _How_ are they weird?”

There was a long pause before he replied.  “...Seems like...far...away,” he mumbled.

I frowned, puzzled.  “In what way?”

“...South...” he replied.  “York’s...weird.”

It was an apt point: most of the crop formations we had observed had occurred in a radius of less than 100 kilometres from Dr. Elliston’s home in Berkshire; York seemed a bit out of the way, though it was certainly closer to the Derbyshire/DNA one.  Perhaps it meant that the mastermind lived around this region.

“Good, John,” I said.  “Now what of the mastermind?”

John snorted, his nose wrinkling endearingly.  “Show-off.”

“Perfectionist,” I amended, resisting the urge to smooth the hair across his forehead.

“Damn...perfect handwriting,” John muttered.  “...Rubs it in.”

“Is he an alien, John?”

“Bugger must be.”

“Do you know him?” I asked, hoping John’s subconscious might have access to memories his waking self could not retrieve.

John frowned in his sleep and sniffled.  I was about to give it up as an ‘I don’t know’ response when he suddenly slurred, “...Merc...ry.”

The slur signified that the episode was ending soon.  “Mercury, John?” I pushed, wondering if I could get a last word out of him.

“...Check...fer it,” he said, then sighed.  I quietly called him after a moment and received no response.

Check for alien-men named Mercury?  Unlikely that would be in any phone book.  The planet Mercury was frankly irrelevant, since it was too far to do anything to affect Earth.  The element mercury?  Perhaps as a poison?  It was a potential substance that could have been used to kill off the livestock before slicing them open; that was one way to keep them quiet.  Further inquiry at the site was needed.  What else could be called mercury?  Ships?  Planes?

My phone beeped—a new text.  John made a small noise at the sound but seemed to ignore it.  I glanced at the screen.

_Elliston’s escaped.  GL_

For a single moment, my mind went blank.  Then it crashed back into functioning with a vengeance: I threw the phone at the wall in a fury.  John jumped awake.  I reached for my gloves, coat, scarf, and began putting them on as I paced the room.

“ _Fucking hell_ ,” John gasped.  “What was that for?!”

“Oh, _stupid_ , it was a diversion, John!  They lured us here, and we scampered along like _lambs!_ ”  I threw his jeans at him.  “For god’s sake, get _dressed_ , John.  We need to get back to London!”

“Sherlock, wait—”

I threw open the door to our room and stormed down the hallway, calculating the quickest route back to London—we could take the rental car, drive on the M1, and it would get us there in three hours and forty-seven minutes.  Not nearly quick enough.

I was stopped at the banister by John yanking on the back of my coat.  I looked behind me; he was still in his shirt and pants.  “ _John_ ,” I hissed.  “Would you _please_ hurry up?!”

“Sherlock,” he said evenly.  “It’s one in the morning.  We’re not going anywhere.”

“John, Elliston’s _escaped_.  Every _second_ that he’s free vastly reduces the chance of his recapture!  Don’t you _see?_ ”

“Yes, and I can tell you that by the time we get back, there won’t be anything we can do.  So we may as well—”

“ _John_.”

“— _go back to sleep_ , look at the crop circle in the morning, then go from there.”

“What’s the _point_ , John?  It was a _decoy_ , a stupid, _obvious_ decoy that even _you_ could pick up on in your sleep!”

A door at the bottom of the stairs opened, and another guest stuck her head out.  “Oi!  Some of us are trying to sleep!”

“Sorry,” John called back, then grabbed my arm and began dragging me back to our room.

“Let _go_ , John,” I snapped, struggling.

“You’re not even wearing shoes!” he snapped back.  “And you left your _phone_ , for Christsakes.  You’re not thinking clearly!”

He shoved me back into the room and locked the door behind him.  I glared.  He rested his back against the door, rubbed at his eyes with one hand, then pointed at me.  “You.  Can be an absolute _git_ sometimes,” he said.

“So I’ve been told,” I retorted.  I crossed my arms, seething, calculating.  Five minutes since Lestrade had texted me, meaning at _least_ half an hour to an hour of Elliston having escaped—with aid, he was likely already safe in some obscure hideout in London, or on the outskirts of the city.

John sighed.  “Look, I know you’re upset, but there’s no point in making a fuss over it now.  What’s done is done.  We’ll get a fresh start in the morning.”  When I made no sign of moving, he rolled his eyes, went to the wall, and retrieved my phone from the floor.  He handed it to me.  “Hope you didn’t break it.”

I checked.  It still seemed to be in order.  I looked down at John.  John looked up at me.

He raised his eyebrows.  “Is getting upset going to help solve the case?” he asked, in that completely deadpan tone of voice that meant he was mocking me.  With my own logic, no less.  The _cheek_.

“I’m not upset,” I retorted.

“Good.  Now go to bed.”

“I’m not tired.”

“Sherlock Holmes...”  He suddenly pushed me, hard, and I fell back onto the bed.  “You have the patience of a six-year-old, and you’re in a bad mood.  You’re going to bed.”  It was the Captain voice.  A tremor ran down my spine and punched me in the gut.  I ignored it.

“Yes, _mummy_.”  I scowled, pulling my feet up and dropping my head onto a pillow.  I stared resolutely at the ceiling.

John’s soft footsteps tread around the bed to the other side, where he pulled back the bedclothes and got in.  He sighed.  “Sherlock, you’re still wearing your coat.”

“I want to.”

“Fine, sleep however you like.  Just actually _sleep_ , for god’s sake.”

“You can’t force me to.”

“Is that a challenge?” he replied.

I furrowed my eyebrows and turned my head to him.  “What?”

He promptly attacked my lips, one hand clamping down on the exposed side of my face to hold it in place.  Fighting against the relapse of that gnawing, John-centred obsession setting fire to my neurons, I think I made an indignant noise.  I raised my hands to push him away but found that they’d betrayed me and buried themselves in his hair.  He made a pleased sound and sucked at my lower lip, and for a moment I was captivated by how my upper lip seemed to fit so perfectly in the dip of his philtrum.  When John pulled away with a particularly smug smirk, I huffed, “John this isn’t the time—” and then was struck by an overwhelming wave of drowsiness.  I was yawning.  John’s smirk spread into a full-blown grin.

“What did you _do?_ ” I mumbled.

He settled back down next to me.  “Gave your suprachiasmatic nucleus[11] a bit of a manual kick-start.”  He hesitated, then snuck another kiss at the corner of my mouth.  “And some small dosages of oxytocin never hurt anyone.  You’ll sleep like a baby.”

“You can _do_ that?” I asked.

He frowned slightly.  “I don’t like to.  Seems a bit intrusive.”  He gently pulled my head to rest against his shoulder, the shoulder a violin could love.  “You deserved it, though.  You were being a prat.”

I sighed and breathed in the scent of his skin, giving it up as a lost cause for the evening.  “John.  That’s cheating.”

“You’ll thank me when you’re rested,” John said.  “G’night.”

“Hm.”

I closed my eyes.  During the night, I dreamt of dragonfly wings, the hum of violins in symphony orchestras, and of lakes shining with quicksilver.

 

***

 

Escorted by DI Humbert Jorviksson—writes longhand in his spare time; characteristic middle finger callus—John and I approached the crime scene in the hazy light of morning.  John was wolfing down a falafel sandwich that he’d insisted on getting in between the trip to Tesco for plastic baggies and the police station—technically his second sandwich; he’d bought one for me as well, but I declined.

“I’ve already got a few of my fellows checkin’ out some of the organs,” said Jorviksson.  “Running tests on them and whatnot.  Bit hard to find anything else, though—no footprints.  We looked all day yesterday.”

I lifted the police tape and held it up for John, who brushed off sandwich crumbs and stepped under.  Glancing at him, I determined I was correct in my previous assessment: John was better suited to sunlight.  He was perhaps even optimal in morning sun—holding a sort of tired, peaceful demeanour that comes from looking forward to the events of the day ahead even while nursing a mug of hot tea.  Waking up that dawn to the sight of John’s sleeping face cast in pinkish-gold light had been enough to render me breathless...I shook my head, inwardly cursing the drowsy effects of sleep on my mind’s focus.  I’d only managed to avoid the question in John’s eyes that morning by insisting on the urgency of returning to London and hastening him to get ready—provoking that discussion _now_ through a lingering gaze would be unwise.  I redirected my gaze to the field.

The singed grain was eerily uniform, now that I could see it up close and in proper light.  None of the stalks had been broken.  The grains aligned perfectly in their bent position, almost as if they had been artfully woven into place, rather than merely flattened with a board, as had been the case with the Warwick circle.  Most tellingly, the burn patterns on the wheat were identical and consistent: the man had not worked with a tool that needed to be reheated constantly before application; it was rather like the pattern had been smoothed with a large, electric clothing iron.  Not a wrinkle or a wheat stalk out of place.  It was the work of a perfectionist, an artist.

However, on looking to the pig organs, I immediately noticed something out of place.

“John!  Bag!” I barked, snatching the hastily retrieved item from his hand and swooping to the ground.  Flipping the bag inside out, I stuffed my hand within and reached out for a stray heart, picked it up, and peeled the plastic around it.  I gazed at it with both a feeling of scorn and triumph.  “Would you look at _that_ ,” I said, holding up the bag for Jorviksson and John to look at.  “How very _sloppy_ of him,” I commented.

“What d’you mean?” the inspector asked.

John, however, raised his eyebrows and held a hand out to it.  He grasped the bag and twisted it, examining.  He wrinkled his nose.  “God, that _is_ sloppy,” he said.

I beamed, a swell of pride bubbling up.  “ _Good_ , John.”

John’s mouth quirked in a small, brief smile.

“Sorry, _what_ is sloppy?” Jorviksson said, looking a touch annoyed.

I sighed and stuffed the heart in a pocket.  I waved a hand at John and began walking the perimeter of the crop circle to search for any stray imprints that may have escaped the narrow sights of the police.  “John, do the honours.”

John turned to the inspector.  “Right, well, the end of it is that the killer did a shoddy job excising.  It’s sliced all over the place, like the pigs were slashed open rather than cut.  It’s a completely different technique to the other one.”

“So?” said Jorviksson, frowning.

“Well, it means he wasn’t a medical man,” John said, clasping his hands behind his back.  “And he doesn’t know his way around bodies at all.”

The inspector looked unimpressed.  “That hardly narrows it down, doctor.”

“Wrong!” I called from the other end of the crop circle.  “It tells us a lot about our little Ripper if we pay attention to the details.”  I paced back around to John and Jorviksson, having caught no sign of any stray footprint or tyre track lying outside the circle.  “For one, the shape of the cuts...” I retrieved the heart and slipped my finger into a v-shaped gash at the corner of the right atrium, near where the vena cava would’ve been, pulling back the tissue a bit.  “See how the tissue is cut at this acute angle?  The lines are identical on either side of the point—the same length, the same cut—he was using scissors or shears of some kind.  Now, of course a medical or meat-handling profession would have access to these kinds of blades, but no self-respecting doctor or butcher would ever make such sloppy errors.  So the question is...what other occupation would use this type of instrument?”

Having made my point with the heart, I stuffed it back in my pocket and gestured to the singed wheat.  “Look at the _work_ he put into this formation.  This isn’t just some _prank_ to this man; this is his _art_ , and he is no amateur.  Anyone with the right tools could make a reasonably convincing crop circle, just as any person with a pen can copy lines from Shakespeare, but this isn’t about _tools._   The level of detail in the design, the flawless arrangement of the grains, the uniformity—he does this for a living.  He knows how to shape vegetation to his vision.  But what could he be?”  I grinned.  “There can be only one answer.  What we have, gentlemen, is a killer florist on our hands.”

There was a stunned silence as John and the inspector stared open-mouthed at me.  John’s eyes sparked on meeting mine.  “Brilliant,” he breathed.  My breath caught in my throat and I glanced away, suppressing the smile that had briefly sprung up on my face.  The thought that my brain wave activity must have hit John like a sugar rush occurred to me for the first time—and in the same moment, it struck me as embarrassingly _intimate_.  I could just as well be feeding him grapes with my own mouth and achieve the same effect.  To think it had been going on for years without my knowledge...it was little wonder that casual observers had assumed a more carnal relationship between John and me in the past.  The carnality was there, just not in the sense they had interpreted.

“Hang on a tick,” said Jorviksson, eyebrows furrowed.  “That’s all well and good, Mr. Holmes, but exactly _which_ florist should we be looking for, huh?”

I directed my gaze to the inspector and breathed out, raising my eyebrows.  “Well, detective inspector, that is precisely what we need to find out now,” I said, smiling in spite of myself.  A killer florist—oh, what little surprises would this Leopold & Loeb come up with next?

I began walking back toward the car, John on one side and Jorviksson on the other.  “It is unfortunate for us that our killer made off with the actual corpses,” I said.  “It makes the M.O. harder to determine.  Although my guess is that if your team aren’t complete incompetents, they will come back with a fast-acting poison.”

John cleared his throat, and I glanced at him.  He was giving me the ‘don’t insult the nice policeman to his face’ look, where his forehead wrinkled slightly as he raised both eyebrows.  I rolled my eyes.

The inspector said, a touch curtly, “Well, I’ll be sure to send you word when I hear from the lab.”

I opened my mouth, but John beat me to it.

“That would be a lot of help, thanks,” John said.

I sighed.  “Yes, most helpful, do you have any coolers, detective inspector?” I said, opening the driver door of our rental car.

Jorviksson looked puzzled as he reached his own vehicle.  “Come again?”

“A cooler, Jorviksson.  For my heart.”  I fetched the heart and rattled it at him, smiling in my most charming fashion.  “It’ll sit better on the train in.” 

  


* * *

[11] A region of the brain responsible for controlling circadian rhythms.  According to John, mine apparently is a bit “wonky.”  But it’s not like I’m some _bear_ that needs to hibernate for the winter, for god’s sakes.


	6. Results

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Disclaimer** : Psst, don’t tell the website that’s linked in the footnotes that I borrowed them, ‘kay? Let’s just keep this between you and me. Just in case. I neither own them nor am I affiliated with them nor do I make profit from them in any shape or capacity.
> 
> **Warnings** : EXTREMELY BAD PUNS. And no, really, watch your step.

Two hours in on the train to London, with my new pig’s heart resting in a small cooler by my feet, John Watson was failing to be subtle at his attempts to hold my hand.  It had started mildly enough; as we were often accustomed to doing, we were sharing an armrest, our elbows touching.  Then I had felt a slight brush of his little finger across one of my knuckles.  I’d looked at him.  He’d quirked a smile and raised an eyebrow.  I’d moved my hand off the armrest, at first merely assuming that my hand was in the way.

But when John’s easygoing expression shifted into furrowed eyebrows and that squinty-eyed perplexity, I recognised my error.  I redirected my gaze to the window and asked him how much longer we had until we reached London.

A slight rustle as he checked his watch.  “Be about another hour, I think.”

I could feel his eyes resting on me.  A movement in my peripheral vision alerted me that his hand was once again reaching for mine, and my brain kicked into a higher gear:

 

_The Situation_ :

> John Watson wants to hold my hand on a public train.  A public display of affection, unusual in John, who is normally very reserved concerning his personal life—or at least tries to be, has _learned_ to be private to feel secure.  Keeping things under wraps from public eyes has been his speciality for a century.  Why would John change his accustomed mindset to engage in such behaviour with me?

 

_Conclusion_ :

> John Watson feels secure with me, enough to want to hold my hand on a public train without giving a damn about the public eye.  He also must _really_ want to hold my hand.

 

_Reactive Options Available to me_ :

> 1. **Hold his hand** – would make John content; would satisfy the section of my brain currently rabbiting on in a John-centric loop about how nice and Lethean it would be to simply _dismiss_ ongoing mental obligations toward the case and indulge in an effortless pastime designed for the smooth undertaking of a progressing ‘romantic’ relationship; would cause sweaty palms; would cause a violent revolt in the section of my brain still ensnared in this captivating tangle of the case; would cause a civil war in my mental faculties; would lead to distraction, to error, which cannot be afforded.  Must regrettably decline option.
> 
> 2.  **Ignore advances** – would make John discontent; would undoubtedly lead to a tedious and unnecessary ‘conversation’; no guarantee it would prevent hand being held; on bright side, would free up mental faculties to continue re-analysing data from case.  Continue consideration of option. 
> 
> 3.  **Cause a distraction** – ask for tea?  Fake a sudden medical issue (unlikely to succeed)?  Would undoubtedly make John suspicious.  Could I—?

 

Fortunately for me, at the moment when John’s hand had nearly reached its goal, my phone rang.  I retrieved it instantly, blocking John’s progress, and noted the caller.

“It’s Jorviksson,” I said, bringing the phone to my ear.

At my side, I saw John nod and continue staring at me.  I ignored the question in his eyes.

“Sherlock Holmes,” I answered.

“Mr. Holmes,” said Jorviksson.  “You were right—they came back with poison.”

“Of course it was poison,” I replied, more for John’s benefit than either mine or the detective inspector’s.  “What sort of poison?”

“Um, it says here that it’s from some sort of plant.  _Mercurialis perennis_.”

My eyes shot open.  “Say that again.”

“The plant?  _Mercurialis perennis_.”

I repeated the name of the plant to John, and his eyebrows shot up.  “Dog’s mercury,” he said.  “It has a toxic alkaloid oil in it.  Pretty volatile, known for killing off livestock.  They called it Oil of Euphorbia in the old days.”[12]

There was no mistaking it now—we had a confirmed trend.  Once was a fluke, twice was a happenstance, and a third occurrence signified a trend.  A killer florist and his associate fixated on passing this message of mercury.  What did it _mean?_

“Was there anything else?” I asked.

“No, that’s all they got,” Jorviksson replied.

“Thank you,” I said, hanging up even as John said, “But—!”

I looked to him.  He had a very puzzled look on his face.  “But it wouldn’t kill off a group of pigs overnight like that,” he explained.  “It would take a few days; the farmer would have noticed they weren’t well before then.”

I frowned, adrenalin from the prospect of having a fitting puzzle piece drying up.  Instead it was replaced with that complicated, savoury sensation I associated with deep contemplation, like tasting a wine full of subtleties.

“It is possible,” I said after a moment, “that our mastermind has supplemented the toxin with an additional poison, so that one can mask or hide the other somehow.  After all, there is no better way to disguise one’s hand than to present a believable half-truth in its stead.”

“Could be,” John said, snagging my hand.

To my embarrassment, I started.  John held on to my hand.

“Why are you doing that?” he said, staring me down.

“What, John?  Be specific,” I snapped, suddenly very conscious of how warm and sweaty John’s palm felt against mine.

“That, Sherlock.  Flinching.  It’s just a hand-hold, for god’s sake.”

I glanced around the car of the train—no one particularly interested in watching us, or at least pretending not to be; they were more likely interested in overhearing a tiff than watching men hold hands.  But that was not the issue.  The issue was that the case now had a _trend_ , an important trend, and the murderer was hiding his hand from me with that trick of the poison, and I needed to know _how_ , and why mercury was significant to these killers, and what did they _want_ from all of this, and where had Elliston escaped to, how had he escaped, how had they made crop circles and slaughtered animals without a trace of personal effect on the soil?  And then there was John’s hand, John’s eyes staring into mine, that ache like a nagging, loose milk tooth needing to be ripped out so the new one nudging at the gums could grow in properly; it was driving me to distraction.  I pulled my hand from his, brought it to rest against my closed eyes, and breathed out.

“John.  You don’t understand.  The work must come first.”

A tense silence.  “No, of course,” John said calmly.  “Why would I think otherwise?  Is that your answer, then?”

A chill ran up my neck.  That was John’s severely miffed tone.  Almost instantly, the chill was followed by a buzz of frustration.  “John, if you would just _try_ to understand,” I said, taking my hand from my eyes and looking at him—how stone-faced he was!  “I can’t just _juggle_ from one mindset to another, not when a case like this needs my undivided focus.  Just imagine...imagine if you put a surgery on hold for a snog, John; the effect is the same.”

At that, the stiffness in his expression softened somewhat.  He sighed and looked away.  After a moment, he said, “Right.  You’re right.  Cold turkey for us, then.”  His shoulders slumped a little as he crossed his arms.  Some forgotten, primal instinct was screaming ‘FIX IT!’ at me from the centre of my gut.

I briefly, barely placed my hand on his upper arm.  “It’s, it’ll be fine, John,” I tried.  “All fine.  Later.”

John snagged my wrist, two fingers seeking out the pulse.  He gazed at his watch.  I let him hold my wrist for a little longer than was strictly necessary—the clinical nature of it was a good mask for the affectionate impulse—before he released it.  “Yep.  Still alive,” he said blandly.

“When it’s over, John,” I said, or rather, blurted.  “When it’s over and I can...focus.  Then...”  I waved between us.  “...Then the hand thing can happen.”  That didn’t sound particularly elegant even to my ears.

John raised an eyebrow and finally looked my way again.  “Well, I’m hoping it’ll be more than just a ‘hand thing,’ but all right.  It’s a date.”  He eased back in his seat and looked straight ahead.  “No distracting Sherlock Holmes on the case.”

“Thank you,” I said, nodding and turning my gaze to the window.  Watching John’s reflection, I noted that he was still glancing at me every handful of seconds.  “And John,” I added after another minute or so of this ridiculous ‘I’m not looking at you’ game we were suddenly playing.  “Be careful with that look.”

“What look?”

“The one where it looks like you’re consuming me with your eyes.”

He furrowed his eyebrows, confused.  “What?”

“When I’m deducing, John.  People will talk.”

“I make a look like that?”

“You do.”

He sighed.  “Well, I guess they’d have reason to talk now.”

I smirked.  “I suppose.”

We passed the rest of the train ride in a comfortable yet timid silence, our elbows still wedged together on the armrest and the pig’s heart resting at my feet.

 

***

 

After a brief yet illuminating look at Elliston’s former cell (“Ah, the old ‘steel filing wire tied around the wrapping of a bland and innocuous package’ trick.  Lestrade, fire the clod who missed such an obvious ploy.”), we returned to Baker Street to review all the information we had available.  Mrs. Hudson fussed at us the whole way up the stairs.

“Good heavens, boys, I know how you like to run about, but it gets eerie at nights when you’re not in.  If that violin’s not making a racket at three in the morning, I can hear the place settling.  John, dear, you look like you’re wasting away—when did you last eat?”

“Um, sometime this morning,” John replied, turning his head at the thirteenth step to look behind him. 

She made a tutting noise from the first landing.  “Sherlock, just because you don’t eat regularly doesn’t mean you should drag poor John into it, too.  I’ll bring up some sandwiches.”

“You’re a life saver, Mrs. Hudson,” John said.  He followed me into the kitchen, where I was stuffing my new heart in the crisper.  “You _will_ eat something today, Sherlock.  Doctor’s orders.”

I shut the refrigerator door.  “I’ve already slept today, John, what more do you want of me?” I replied, gliding past him to return to the wall where the crop circle pictures were taped.  I felt more than heard John step next to me, and we stared at the images together for a moment.  The sound of Mrs. Hudson coming back up the stairs was noticeable.

“Oh.  Oh dear,” John said, leaving my side and going to the door.  “Let me help you with that.”

I turned and saw John reaching out to take a large and overwhelmingly _pink_ bouquet[13] from our landlady’s right hand.  In her left hand, she was balancing a plate of turkey sandwiches, and a bottle of wine— _Château Lafite_ _Rothschild_ , vintage 2009, good lord that’s expensive—was stuffed under her armpit.

“Sherlock, dear, your brother stopped by this morning—”

“Oh _hell_ ,” I snarled, whirling away from the saccharine, nauseating monstrosity.

John read the note aloud.  “Sending my heartfelt congratulations to you both.  Enjoy the wine; I’ve been saving it since 2010.  Mycroft Holmes.”  He looked up, eyes wide with a sudden and well-deserved panic.  “Oh god.”

“Did something happen?” Mrs. Hudson asked.

“ _NO_ ,” John and I shouted simultaneously.

She set the plate and the wine down on a table and raised her hands.  “All right, no need to shout.  My ears still work properly, you know.” 

“Sherlock, I thought you told him not to bug the room this time!” John said, wandering as if on automatic to the sandwich plate and picking up one but not eating it.

“I _did_ tell him,” I replied, pressing the tips of my fingers to my temples and shutting my eyes.  “ _God_ , we’re going to be forced to pick out wedding invitations any day now.”

“ _What?_ ” said John, even as Mrs. Hudson visibly lit up and said, “Oh, it took you boys long enough!”  She reached out to the nearest of us—me, in this case—and pulled me into a hug.  “It’s about time you two settled proper.”

“Hang on,” said John, still holding but not eating the turkey sandwich.  “Doesn’t...doesn’t one of us need to propose before all that?”

I levelled him with an even stare over Mrs. Hudson’s head.  “You greatly underestimate my brother, John.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Hudson, pulling back.  “So there isn’t going to be a wedding?”

“No,” said John in the same moment I said, “Not yet.”

Our eyes locked.

I looked away first, the telltale warmth rising to my cheeks.  I cleared my throat and gently removed Mrs. Hudson from my person.  She looked strangely delighted.

“I’ll just leave you boys to it, then,” she said, standing on her toes to plant a kiss on my cheek.  She went over to John and kissed him on the cheek as well.  “Make sure he eats something, John.”

“Mm, sure,” John replied, eyes fixed on me.

With a knowing smile, Mrs. Hudson left the room.

He took a step forward.  “Sher—”

“John,” I interrupted.  “Remember what we agreed on the train.”

John stiffened, then muttered, “Cold turkey.”  There was a pause where we simply stared at each other, and then he cleared his throat a little, said “Right,” and raised his sandwich to his mouth.  Partway through a bite, he did a double-take.  He squinted at the sandwich.

“What?” I asked.

“It’s...well,” he said, holding up the serendipitously appropriate sandwich.

On eye contact, we burst into a fit of giggles.  Our two disparate laughs ringing harmoniously throughout the flat seemed sanctifying enough to my ears; it cleared away the silent strain that had threatened to swarm into the room.  Peace descended, and the gentle chiming quieted to small gasps for air.  John sent me a blatantly enamoured grin.

“Christ, look at us both.  That was terrible; we shouldn’t be laughing at that.  It’s not even funny,” he said.

I smiled—couldn’t seem to stop beaming like an idiot—and turned back to the wall of photographs.  “Remember the train, John,” I said, fighting and failing to keep the mirth from my voice.

“Right, right.  No distracting Sherlock Holmes on the case.”  There was the sound of lettuce being chomped into.  “What are we going to do about this...stuff?” he asked, undoubtedly referring to Mycroft’s gifts.

I took a deep breath through my nose, getting my heart to settle down.  I tapped my fingertips together and studied the pictures, pressing the index fingers to my lips.  “Burn the flowers, save the wine,” I replied.  “It’s a very pricey vintage.”

“Can do,” John said.  “But first...”  Suddenly, a sandwich appeared in front of my face.  “Eat something, Sherlock.  For my sake.”

I sighed, rolled my eyes, estimated that it had been at least three days since I’d last eaten, then leaned forward and took a bite.

“Sherlock, I’m not going to stand here and hold your sandwich for you.”

“It would make things easier,” I said, masticating.

“For you it would.  Take the sandwich.”

I took it, biting and chewing on autopilot until suddenly I ran out of sandwich.  My hands now free, I returned them to their customary position at the tip of my lips and studied our crop circles.  Two triangles connected at a shared point, concentric circles, DNA, skull-and-crossbones, compass rose, and a caduceus.

 

_What we understood so far:_

> **caduceus** – symbol of Mercury, false symbol of medicine, two snakes wrapped around a staff
> 
> **compass rose** – symbol of direction and navigation, potentially connected with planet Mercury
> 
> **skull-and-crossbones** – symbol of danger, hazardous material, pirates, poison... _poison_.  Oh those clever little _snakes_.

 

“John,” I said.  “They were telling us they were using poison.  The skull-and-bones.”

There was a faint rustling noise as John pitched the flowers into the fireplace, then the sound of his footsteps as he came over to the wall.  He was still holding on to the vase and the note.  “Really?  Do you think...they’ve been dropping hints all along, haven’t they?”

“There is no doubt of that, John.”  I sighed.  “I made the mistake of assuming the images themselves were insignificant at the start.  Clearly they are not so.”

“The triangles and the circles don’t seem very telling, though,” John commented, drumming his fingers against the vase.  “I guess the triangles look like an hourglass?”

“Perhaps.  A symbol of time, death.  Could be boasting that it only takes them an hour to do everything.”

“The circles look like a bull’s-eye.[14]”

“Perhaps they have a target in mind.”

“And the double helix...oh,” John said.

I turned sharply to him.  “What?”

John was a little wide-eyed.  “The double helix, DNA structure—it was discovered by James Watson—no relation—and Francis Crick, back in ‘53.[15]  It’s sometimes called the Watson-Crick model.”  He blinked and wet his lips.  “I once knew a man named Crick.”

“ _John_ ,” I breathed.  Answers, _at last_.  Answers that were staring us in the face, coalescing.  Oh, it was so close, I could taste the sweet, carbonated taste of success just on the tip of my tongue.  My heart rate rocketed in a mixture of excitement and concern.  I grasped him by the shoulders.  “You must tell me everything you know about this man, now.  Leave nothing out.”

“There’s not much to tell,” John said.  I gave him a look.  “Honestly,” he insisted.  “Sometimes we had the same classes together during my undergraduate studies; I think he was my lab partner once.  Every now and then he’d be in a group of mates I’d go to the pub with.  I’ve no idea what he’d want from me.”

“Are you sure?” I asked, pressing my fingers into his shoulders.  “Are you sure you never upset him, said some offhand comment, played some practical joke on him?  Anything to make him hold a grudge?”

“No.  There’s nothing I can think of.  He was a pretty decent bloke.”

I sighed, let go of John, and paced for a minute.  There was something missing, something _obvious_.  “Did you, I don’t know, inadvertently sleep with his sister or something?” I asked.

John frowned, set the vase down, and crossed his arms.  “ _Sherlock,_ I think I have a bit more tact than that.”

“Then why is he targeting you?”

“How should I know?” John replied, mildly annoyed.  “He should be dead by now.”

I stopped pacing.  “What?”  A strange, sudden _thump_ in my chest—either the thrill of a new twist, or the pang of a false lead.

“Sherlock, I got my Bachelor’s in 1901.”

For a moment, my mind screeched to a halt.  I blinked.  “Then how did you meet Mike Stamford at Bart’s?”

“I get a new doctorate every few years or so—have to keep up with the new technology and everything.  And it looks a good deal less suspicious on the CV nowadays to have a degree _not_ from 1901,” John said.

I stared at him.  John stared back, looking every bit as ordinary as he always did, like the mountain you forget about in the background until you suddenly realise just how old and inspiring it is.  The strange, sudden _thump_ pounded into my ribcage again—new twist.  “John...just how many degrees do you have?”

He looked to the ceiling, counting on his fingers.  “I think it’s...four, now?” he replied.  “No, five.”

_Five_ doctoral degrees... _dear_ _god._   A hot shiver spread across my skin, down to my toes.  I swallowed and concentrated on breathing.  The thought of John housing such a vast reservoir of medical knowledge, like some lost Alexandrian Library recently uncovered... _god_ that was magnificent.  Resisting the impulse to throw myself at him like a moonstruck schoolgirl was proving to be a biblical effort.  I may or may not have been...trembling, just slightly.

John raised an eyebrow, and his lips began a slow, upward tilt.  “Sherlock, you’re staring,” he said, a touch smugly.

In my defence, I had _meant_ to say something like “No, John, I’m _observing_ ,” but instead it came out sounding like “Njhnmbsrvng.”  I shook my head.  John was smirking full force.  “ _John_ —”  No, that sounded too hoarse; I cleared my throat, tried again, put on my best PR smile.  “John, we’ll have to discuss your fascinating history of education at a later time.  The issue at hand—you say the man is dead?”

John crossed his arms and cocked his head, smiling with a sparkle in his eyes.  “I served in both World Wars, too,” he said casually.  “And a few other conflicts here and there.”

“ _John_ , for god’s sakes, not _now_ ,” I hissed, wondering with a sense of horror just how red my face must look.  If my burning ears were any indication, I must have looked ridiculous.  Even my palms were sweating.  “ _The man_ , John, you think he’s dead?” I snapped, giving up on controlling my treacherous vocal chords for the present.

John let his smirk fall in an attempt at regaining the gravity of the situation.  I took the time to steady my breathing to something like normal.  “He should be,” he said at last.  He looked puzzled.  “Maybe it’s a descendant of his?”

“Or an alien,” I murmured.  I glanced at my hands, saw that they seemed wobbly, then shook them out for a moment.

John furrowed his eyebrows.  “Don’t you think I’d have noticed something like that?”

“Whatever remains, John, no matter how improbable,” I said.  “Although I would not rule out descendants just yet.”  I sighed and began pacing the floor again, giving John something of a wide berth to be on the safe side.  “So they presumably want _you_ , for whatever reason, and they’ve been killing off ten percent of livestock and creating crop formations in order to get our attention.  They’ve been leaving us clues and hinting at Mercury.  They are staging an elaborate game to get us to run across England.  For all we know, it’s merely an elaborate trap.  You don’t owe them anything, do you?” I asked John, thinking of a ten percent tithe.

“Nope,” said John.

“What am I _missing_?” I growled, coming to an abrupt stop in front of the fireplace and glaring down at the flowers waiting to be incinerated.  “How hard can it be to track down a killer vet and a florist?”  ...A _florist_.  Oh, _stupid_ , it was staring me right in the face for the past twenty minutes—damn John’s distracting magnetism!

“John!” I barked, turning just as John stepped next to me.

“Sherlock,” he said, holding up Mycroft’s card from the flower arrangement.

On the back of the card was the picture of a man wearing a winged helmet and winged shoes, and he held a bouquet in one hand and the caduceus in the other.  “BFD”—Bouquets For Delivery—was printed at the bottom.

“It’s Mercury,” John said.  “The god Mercury!”

My heart trilled, blood singing with adrenalin, the first taste of victory.  “John, we’ve got them!” I shouted, and I surely must have lost myself in that second, because next thing I knew I was stuffing my tongue inside John’s mouth and backing him towards the sofa.  Our teeth clicked together.  And _god,_ I didn’t realise my upper lip was that sensitive until John sucked at it; I shivered, gasped.  John was moaning something fierce and pulling at my neck so hard I wondered if it would leave a bruise.  My hands clawed at the wool of his jumper, and the heat of his chest against mine just _wasn’t at all close enough_ , and I pulled and pushed until his calves hit the sofa and sent us both falling ungracefully on top of it, foreheads and noses knocking into each other.

We blinked, panting, and drew back slightly.  One of John’s hands still gripped my neck; the other was curled across my back.  My knees rested on either side of his thighs.  John’s pupils were dilated, his lips a little swollen.  My heart thudded, intoxicated.

“You all right?” John asked.

I nodded, blinking some more, and gasped out, “I thought we agreed cold turkey.”

John tugged at me.  “You started it,” he said, pulling me down into another sloppy kiss.

I groaned, revelling in the glide of his tongue across mine—warm, slick, smooth, tasting of tea and bread.  John’s hand yanked up the bottom of my shirt and snuck its way to the skin of my stomach, and the press of his fingers was setting off some kind of dusty circuit in my mind, lighting up some forgotten bulb in a rarely used room, flooding it with a welcoming glow.

“ _John_ ,” I said, breaking the kiss and moving to his neck.  I sucked at it, and he made the best sort of noise.  “John, we’re supposed to be catching criminals,” I murmured, half wanting not to say it but half needing to say it because the case was knocking like a sour, unruly neighbour at the Palace door all of a sudden.

“They can bloody well _wait_ for us, then,” John retorted.  He gripped my shirt and pulled me sideways—probably intending just to flip our positions on the sofa—instead landing me on the floor with a heavy _thud_ , John sprawled on top of me.

“Ouch,” I said mildly, not hurt, just thrown off.

“Sorry,” John chuckled, then continued where he left off with his hand dragging up underneath the shirt to tease a nipple; his tongue licked at my throat.  It felt like a dozen more circuits going off in the dim corners of my mind.  I clasped him to me, tasted the salt at the base of his ear, felt the heat of his clothed prick bulging against my thigh.

“John,” I groaned.  Then winced—the backlash of ‘CASEMURDERCRIMINALGET’ was shattering thousands of mental windowpanes, yet the draw of John’s mouth pressing open-mouthed kisses at my sternum was too strong to ignore or reject.  My mind was clashing with itself, loud and ferocious, and I couldn’t care, I needed it to be _done_ so I could breathe, so I could _think_.  This had to be solved, _now_ ,but _god in heaven_ this heat was too marvellous to just put down.  “ _John_ ,” I choked out.  “ _Quick._ ”

John looked into my eyes, forehead creased with sudden worry.  “Sherlock, you okay?” he panted.

“ _For god’s sake, John,_ ” I snapped, squeezing my eyes shut against the fingernails-on-chalkboard-screeching-CASE.

John fumbled with our zips, somehow managed to pull us both out, and pressed our lengths together—a sudden, hot jolt.  We moaned at the same pitch.  I felt John press his lips to mine, his left hand curling into my right.

“Sherlock, look at me,” he said.

I squinted my eyes open.  John was staring at me through the brief shimmer of his third eyelid.  That aura—the aura of a married man in love—something wordless, magnificent.  For a second I forgot breathing.

“You want it now?  Fast?  You’re sure?” he asked.

“Yes, god, _please_ , John,” I said.  He nodded and kissed me again, brief.

With a deep, shuddering breath, John started moving, thrusting against my prick, and I arched my back and groaned, eyes squeezing shut again, bombarded with electric neurochemicals coursing up and down my flesh, across my mind, like a live wire.

“ _God_ , Sherlock,” he moaned into my shoulder.

I locked my arms across his back and held on for dear life, thrusting upwards into his stomach, brain pounding with a migraine and blood thundering through my skin.  My back stung with the friction from the rug and John was sweating like no tomorrow but that was far from any sort of consciousness I had at that moment, because every neuron was firing CASEJOHNMURDERCRIMINALCLUEJOHNJOHNJOHN _JOHN_ —and all at once the orgasm hit me like a runaway lorry, and I shuddered through it, gasping for air.  Approximately five seconds later John shouted my name and came all over my stomach.  He collapsed on top of me.  We breathed.  My head felt like a violin string had snapped—a stinging, mental whiplash—though John’s weight on my chest was a tactile comfort.  I kept my eyes closed, shivering.

John rolled off to the side, pressing a kiss to my jaw in passing.  “ _Christ_ ,” he breathed.  “Haven’t had a shag like that in ages.”

Oh, god, no, _noise_ , noise hurt.  “Urgh,” I replied, lifting an arm and pressing it against my eyes.  Light, light hurt too.

“Oh god,” John said, his panicked tone loud as cymbals clashing.  “Oh god, Sherlock, did I hurt you?”  I felt his hands on my arm and chest.

“Not...intentionally,” I grated out.  I breathed for a minute, tried to collect sentences together.  “My mind...cannot focus...on two such disparate things, John.  The brain is like a muscle...I have trained it one way...comprehensive focus towards a single goal.  When the focus is split...it is like a new routine...overexertion...pulling a muscle.”

“Why didn’t you _say_ something?” he asked, a hand carding through my hair.  The touch seemed to help a little.

“I _did_ say something,” I retorted.  “I’ve _been_ saying cold turkey for a _reason_ , John.”  I moved my arm away from my eyes and attempted sight.  I saw John’s face above me; he looked positively devastated.  I sighed, closed my eyes again, and reached a hand up, fumbling around until my palm found his cheek.  “John, if I hadn’t wanted it, I would’ve said so,” I murmured.  “Timing was the inconvenience; the enthusiasm was mutual.”

His hand pressed against mine on his cheek.  “God, if I’d known it’d do _this_...” he said.  He turned his head slightly, pressing his lips to the tips of my fingers.  “The next time will be better, I promise.  I’ll make sure of it.”  The way he said it, it was like he was vowing to fulfil my dying wish.  For all I knew, it could very well be; even the rug felt like it was scraping into my brain cells at this point.

“John, get me off this floor,” I said, making my first real attempt at moving by raising myself up onto my elbows.  My vision flooded with red and green spots.  John’s arms wrapped around me, pulling me up.

“Okay, easy, just take it easy,” he was murmuring.  “I’ve got you.”  There was a brief and probably comical moment where we both forgot that our trousers were awkwardly pulled down somewhat, and we tried to reorder ourselves as necessary.  John tried and failed to suppress a self-conscious giggle at the mess we’d made.  “I’ll take care of that in a minute,” he said.  “Where should we put you, Sherlock?”

I’d since buried my eyes into his neck, leaning heavily on him, fighting down a sudden wave of vertigo.  “Bed,” I said after a moment.  “Dark.”

He gripped my waist firmly and held on to the hand I’d draped across his shoulders.  “All right.  Nice and easy.”  Step by step, we shuffled our way to my room, and when my head hit the goose-down pillow, it was like being met with a cool compress—just what I needed.  I sighed and pulled my arm to rest across my eyes once more, blocking out the vestiges of light.

“I’ll be back with a cloth,” said John, and he stepped out of the room.  The vague sounds of him rustling around in the adjoining washroom—running water from the tap, opening the medicine cabinet—were almost a comfort if they weren’t so dissonant to my overtaxed senses.  A minute, ten minutes, sometime later (I couldn’t tell), when he padded back into the room, I detected a faint smell of soap—he’d likely washed himself up briefly while in there—and then felt the warm, damp cloth brushing across my stomach.  I jumped slightly, suddenly recalled our conversation from yesterday which had inadvertently led us into this abrupt leap of logic the public calls a romance— _“Do you have a navel?”_ —and couldn’t hold back a small chuckle that escaped when John brushed near my lower rib.

“Ticklish, are you?” John said.  I could hear the smile in his voice.

I sighed.  “If I let myself think about it.”

“...How does that work?” he asked.

“No idea.  Not now,” I said.  I removed my arm from my eyes and squinted my eyes open.  The light was less harsh in here—just the bedside lamp glowing yellow, the curtains pulled shut against the glare of the sun.  John was watching me steadily with the sympathy of a professional bedside manner.  He nodded to the nightstand.

“There’s a glass of water there and some paracetamol.  You should take some,” he said.

I crinkled my eyebrows at him.  “Painkillers will slow me down.”

“So will a migraine, stress headache, or whatever it is you have right now,” John countered.  He stopped rubbing the cloth across my stomach a moment to reach back and pull off my shoes, setting them on the floor.  “Whether you like it or not, you’re going to need rest, Sherlock.”  He tugged at my trousers and pants again, thoroughly clinical, pulling them off completely before wiping gently at the skin.  Practically babying me, really, though he hid it well with the perfunctory movements.  He got up from the bed and went to my dresser.  He started to open the top drawer.

“Second drawer, John,” I supplied.

He opened the correct drawer and pulled out a fresh pair of pants, starting back to the bed.

“I _can_ dress myself, John.”

He raised an eyebrow.  “Suit yourself,” he said, dropping the pants across my genitals.  “Should I get you a new shirt while I’m at it?”

“Don’t care,” I replied.

He crossed his arms.  “You really should take the painkiller, Sherlock.”

I frowned.

“Look, if the circumstances were different, I could get right in there and fix it immediately, but I don’t know your mind well enough yet.  Don’t want to accidentally damage something and make it worse,” John said.

I stared at him.  “You can do that?” I asked.

“Yeah.”  He licked his bottom lip.  “Bit out of practice, though.  Can’t exactly go around healing brains without drawing attention to myself.  So you should take the paracetamol.”

I sighed, reached for the glass and tablet, and downed the pill with water.  “Just what all _can_ you do with minds, Dr. Watson?” I asked after I set the glass down again.

“Lots,” he said offhandedly.  He stepped forward and picked up my hand, running a thumb across my knuckles as he snuck in another pulse check.  “Next time...if you like, I’d love to treat you to a bit of a demonstration, how does that sound?”

I had no idea what that could entail, but it sounded damned interesting.  I told him so and sent him a curt smile.  I closed my eyes again and sighed, settling back into my blessedly cool pillow.

John maintained a hold on my hand.  “It _will_ be better next time, Sherlock,” he said softly.  A touch of guilt in his tone.  I sighed impatiently—honestly, I thought we’d established that it was a faultless incident.  “All right, you stay here,” he continued, “I’m going to change into some fresh clothes and fetch us some proper food.”

“We just ate,” I mumbled.

“Well, I don’t know about you, but _I’ve_ worked up an appetite again,” John retorted.  “Try to get some sleep, doctor’s orders.  Want me to get anything else while I’m out?”

“May as well pick up a carton of lube while you’re at it,” I drawled.

His hand tightened a bit around mine, and I peeked an eye open to catch the flush across his face—most endearing.  I smirked.

He cleared his throat.  “Right, I’ll be off then.”  He patted my hand, set it down, then reached across to drag the duvet the wrong way back over me.  He hesitated, then pressed a kiss to my forehead.  “Stay put,” he reminded me.  Mother hen.

I made a noise to acknowledge the command, and John finally clicked off my light and left the room, shutting the door softly behind him.  I listened to the distant creak of the stair and floorboards as he ascended to his room to change, then the repeated symphony of sound as he descended the same stairs and proceeded out to the street.  When I heard the sound of the street door closing, I threw back the duvet and swung my legs over the side of the bed.  Too fast—the room spun a moment, and I closed my eyes and breathed deeply through my nose.  I just had to wait for the analgesic to take effect, and then it was likely that I could move like a proper human being again, though it would likely slow my mental processes.

I tried to remember where my phone was.  Likely in my coat.  Coat was on the sitting room door hook.  I remembered that a fresh pair of pants was resting on my thigh, and I slowly pulled them on.  Where was my house robe?  Ah, on the hook of the bedroom door—good.  Carefully, I stood up and walked to the door, retrieving the robe and slipping it on.  I opened the door and winced at the flood of daylight.  Shielding my eyes as best as I could, I stumbled my way through the kitchen into the living room and managed to stub my toe on an unsupervised chair along the way, which did nothing to deter the overactive pain receptors in my brain.  I reached my coat, searched in a pocket, and pulled out the phone.  I retreated to the dark of my bedroom as swiftly as I was able and collapsed against the bed.  I pulled the phone up to my eyes and texted.

_I need you to keep an eye on John.  SH_

There was a pause of about a minute before I got a response.

_Is that a request?  MH_

_Yes.  SH_

_What happened to “don’t kidnap him, Mycroft”?  MH_

_He could be in danger.  SH_

_And for how long should I be “keeping an eye on” him?  MH_

_A few hours, if you can manage it.  SH_

_While you chase down some dangerous criminal on your own, Sherlock?  I could hardly allow that.  MH_

I cursed.  Of course my brother would see through that.

_They are targeting him, Mycroft.  I don’t know why.  SH_

_That’s hardly an excuse to chase them on your own, Sherlock.  At least bring Lestrade with you.  MH_

I rolled my eyes and winced when I realised it hurt to do that.

_Because Lestrade did such a fantastic job holding on to the primary suspect before.  SH_

_Sherlock, don’t be so intractable.  MH_

I groaned.  I didn’t have time for this.  I had a case to solve before it tore my brain cells into split ends out of frustration.

_Either help or don’t.  I’m entrusting his safety to you.  If he dies, I will hold you responsible.  SH_

I then resolutely ignored any other texts that came through for the time being.  That last one would hopefully be enough to sway Mycroft’s hand in my favour; ever since that whole business with Moriarty, Mycroft was a bit paranoid about how his actions might affect the safety of his self-appointed ‘charges.’  And considering that John was near enough his brother-in-law now, he would be more compelled to ensure his safety.  It would have to do.  Hopefully.  Most likely.  Seventy percent chance of success.

The painkiller was slowly working its way through my system and dulling the pain, barely.  Instead of a sharp burn, it was more like a blunted smoulder.  Manageable.  I closed my eyes, breathed deeply through my nose, exhaled through my mouth.  I needed a plan.  First, find address of florist on phone.  I ran my fingers across my phone’s touch-screen keyboard without looking at it—Bouquets For Delivery, that was it—and waited half a second for the ping of a result.  I glanced down at the screen: 422 Dapplers Lane, about a twenty-minute cab drive from Baker Street.  Almost annoying that they had been so close by.

Weapon?  Could fetch John’s gun from upstairs.  Would require dragging myself up the stairs.  Possible he took the gun with him today.  Check later.  Shower?  Possibly.  I sniffed.  No, definitely.  In spite of John’s efforts, I still reeked of sex, sweat, and John.  Unbidden, my tongue wet my lips—I could still taste salt lingering on the upper lip.  Instantaneous gustatory memory of John’s mouth—tea, bread—immediately followed by auditory memory of him gasping my name, not more than forty minutes ago.  Stupidly, I found myself blushing again—such a wasteful, useless physiological reaction, why it was never bred out on the evolutionary chain is beyond me—and, equally perplexing, I was laughing softly, mindlessly delirious on lingering oxytocin levels and just...damn.  I knew I shouldn’t have taken the painkillers; they reduced my concentration.  Right.  Quick shower.  Couldn’t face mastermind in this state.  Maintaining one’s _ethos_ is essential with these things.  I rubbed at my temple, trying to massage out a sudden, heavy _throb_ in my left cerebral hemisphere.

Sighing, I dragged myself off the bed and into the bath, wincing at the harsh fluorescent lighting, and set the water to lukewarm—cool enough to soothe my overheated brain, warm enough for my skin not to feel the shock of the chill.  I stood there and let the water hit my face for a minute or so.  I idly soaped until I got distracted by the iridescent shine off a soap bubble, which in turn reminded me of the shine of John’s nictitating membrane, which in turn reminded me of that glorious _look_ he had when he was in an enamoured state, which in turn _oh hell._  Was it going to be like this _all the time_?  Countless sources had led me to believe that resolved sexual tension was supposed to _fix_ these sorts of things, not _aggravate_ them.  New datum: the Internet is _useless_ when it comes to romantic advice.

Unless these obsessive fixations were an STI of some sort?  ‘That can happen with unprotected sex,’ some long-buried memory of secondary school sexual education reminded me.  That and pregnancy.  I biologically couldn’t be pregnant.  I would have to kill John if he’d given me a strange brain-withering STI—wait, no, John’s a doctor, a doctor who very obviously cares for me and would not knowingly give me strange STIs.  Unless it was an alien disease.  Oh god.  _I’d contracted an alien neural degenerative venereal disease_.  No...no, John would not do that; he is much too careful.  Maybe he impregnated my brain with an alien...electric...foetus...somehow.  We could call it Athena.  God I hope my brain is not pregnant.  I might have to kill John if he did that; there’s little enough room in my skull for a child.  Would have to question John about the likelihood of that later.

Blinking, I suddenly wondered how long I’d been standing there having the most ridiculous stream-of-consciousness episode of my life.  I scowled, turned off the water, and towelled off as quickly as I could, making my way back to my room to pick out new clothes.  A glance at the bedside clock informed me that I’d managed to waste at least half an hour.  Sheer, utter waste.  How much time had we given the criminals now?  Two hours since the return to Baker Street, at least; likely an entire day since Elliston’s escape.  Would I even _find_ anything there now?  I ground my teeth and pulled on clothes, stumbling out of my room to fetch my coat.  I tore out a few drawers in the kitchen in search of sunglasses, miraculously found a pair, and left.

I spent the cab ride drumming my fingers, keeping my eyes shut behind the shades to minimize visual overstimulation.  I mentally scavenged the data _one more time_ because there was always _something_ I must have missed.  

 

> Ten percent killed each time
> 
> They want John but why?
> 
> A veterinarian
> 
> A florist
> 
> Poison, one identified
> 
> another unknown
> 
> Time
> 
> Target
> 
> John
> 
> Poison
> 
> Direction
> 
> Mercury
> 
> False
> 
> Medicine
> 
> He wants nothing from you Mister Holmes
> 
> Not a thing
> 
> Why even crop circles at all?
> 
> Elliston
> 
> Crick
> 
> They want John but why but why they must know about him
> 
> Why ten percent? 

 

Ten percent: the ten percent law of the transfer of energy, ten percent tithe, Roman decimation of unruly soldiers, _Decima_ the Roman Fate of Allotting Life and Destiny, no, _nothing_.  Nothing and the cab had stopped, the cabbie telling me a second time that we’d arrived.  I stuffed money through the slot and got out, just then realising that I’d forgotten to check John’s room for the gun.

But it was too late, too late because they must have seen me coming from so far off, and I couldn’t turn back now—I was so close.  My hand turned the door handle.

 

* * *

  
[12] Long, Harold Cecil.  “Dog’s Mercury ( _Mercurialis perennis_ L.) and Annual Mercury ( _M. annua_ L.).”  _Plants Poisonous to Livestock_.  2 nd ed.  Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1924.  67-9.

[13][ This monstrosity](http://www.ftd.com/congratulations-pcg/dreamland-pink-bouquet/occasion-congratulations/ffdl/?sid=1).  Good god, it’s even on the damn website!  Those conceited _bastards_ were clearly rubbing this in our faces!

[14] Or, upon reflection, the formation could have been intended to represent the Bohr model of an atom.  It is still unclear which interpretation is correct.

[15] [Watson, James D.  _The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA_.  New York: Atheneum, 1968.]  My intense stupidity in not thinking of this as an option is unforgiveable.  Though perhaps the sharing of John’s ridiculously _common_ surname would not have been enough to raise suspicion back then.  (Yet even still...)

      —Interestingly enough, Francis Crick was also involved in the study of gamma-wave neural oscillations and theoretical neurobiology (perhaps this was another hint?), publishing a theory with Christof Koch entitled “Towards a neurobiological theory of consciousness” in _Seminars in the Neurosciences_ (v.2) in 1990.  They argued that there is a significant relation between the binding problem and the problem of visual consciousness and, as a result, that synchronous 40 Hz oscillations (gamma waves) may be causally implicated in visual awareness as well as in visual binding.  Crick and Koch would later express scepticism over the idea that 40 Hz oscillations is sufficient condition for visual awareness in an article entitled "Framework for consciousness" in _Nature Neuroscience_ (v.6) in 2003.


	7. Discussion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Disclaimers** : Although I based some things on real science, there’s also a lot of hand-wavy sci-fi “science” going on. In case that, er, wasn’t clear before now. 
> 
> **Warnings** : I’ll start with a reassurance—when I clicked the box that says “No Archive Warnings Apply,” I meant it, so there should be no worries on that account. However, this chapter does contain material which could be potentially triggering for some readers, so proceed at your discretion: there is some mention/discussion of grief and suicidal depression, and **I take the principle of Chekov’s gun very, very seriously**. So keep that in mind.

I was immediately assaulted by the scent of roses and jasmine lingering in a perpetual state of blossom.  A soft recording of “ _Sous le dôme épais_ ” from Delibes’s _Lakmé_ played in the background—tacky.  The door jangled shut as I stepped inside, virtually surrounded by a myriad of petalled specimens resting in glass orbs of water.  Crocuses, irises, daffodils, chrysanthemums, baby’s breath, variegated tulips, and roses, roses, roses, like a teeming mass of bacteria flourishing in the confines of a Petri dish—rich, vibrant, alive, and contained.  I approached the pink granite countertop, empty of personnel.  They must have heard me come in—the bells on the door had sounded.  Which means they had either fled, or they were lying in wait.  I removed my sunglasses and pocketed them.

On the counter, there rested a single glass vial holding a purple bloom of some kind—likely an iris: it had the haughty, upright petals of one, with an even number of petals also curling downward.  Nearer the base of each petal, the veins stood out in a thick red, eerily similar to the mapwork of the human vascular system as it shows through skin.  I heard a shuffling noise.

The noise came from an open door leading into the back workroom.  So they were waiting then.  I took a step towards the door.

Before I could take another step, a blond middle-aged man emerged from the work door holding an immense vase stuffed with carnations, which he crossed the room with to put on a shelf in the window.  He fussed a little with the blooms after he’d set them down, flicking them into place, and then he readjusted a thin pair of spectacles resting on his nose.  He straightened up, turned, and saw me.

For a moment, we simply stared at each other.  It is difficult and irrelevant to describe what I felt in that instant, but the atmosphere tensed in such a way that it was analogous to the friction that occurs upon the meeting of two venomous snakes.

“I see you are not looking for _les fleurs_ , _monsieur_ ,” said the man.

 _French_.  Parisian accent.  Of course, it just _had_ to be a Frenchman, didn’t it?  “I’m in a flower shop.  What else could I be looking for?” I replied, placing my hands in the pockets of my Belstaff.

The man crossed his arms and eyed me with a critical air.  When he spoke again, he spoke carefully, enunciating with the practiced, crisp clarity of a performer—or perhaps a singer—tenor, most likely.  “When a man comes to buy flowers, the first thing he sees is the price.  You looked at the flowers instead, _monsieur_.”

“Oh?” I said, taking a step closer.  “And what gave me away?  The lack of pound signs shining in my eyes?”

He sniffed.  “ _Ridicule._  A man buying flowers has one of two little habits—the anxious man who missed his wife’s _anniversaire_ picks at his wallet as if he might break it; the newfound lover is generous and careless, he slaps a wallet on a counter as if it were mere cloth.  You have done neither.”

As he said it, it occurred to me that I should have entered the shop with such a façade as he described, rather than just barged in, planless.  A flutter of self-annoyance pulsed in my head, reminding me that the headache was only being kept at bay, not gone.  “I take it you are Mr. Crick.”

“ _Mister_ Holmes,” said the man, purposely dropping the ‘ _monsieur_ ’ and emphasizing the ‘Mister’ with a slight hiss _._  He extended a hand; I took it.  His palm was considerably warm, the pads of his fingertips callused from years’ worth of pricking one’s fingers on thorns.  There was another prominent callus on his thumb.  “You have kept me waiting.”

“And you have played coy,” I replied.  I released his hand, replaced my own in my pocket.  I stared him down.  His eyes were mud-brown.  “But to what end, Mr. Crick?”

His eyebrows arched.  “Who says this is an _end_ , Mister Holmes?  Perhaps it is a beginning.”  He stalked past me in a rush of air and picked up the flower on the counter.  Abruptly, he twisted and held it out to me with both hands.  “Your timing is impeccably atrocious.  If you were another day late, she would have lost all of her charm.”  He extended the vial out to me, impatient.

I frowned and took the blossom from him.  I flipped open the folded tag tied around the vial that I hadn’t bothered to open before and rolled my eyes when I read the name.  _Tacky_.  “ _Iris reichenbachii_ ,[16]” I droned, a sour taste filling my mouth.  “A friend of the late Richard Brook, are you?”

“Not as such,” Crick replied, lightly examining his nails.  “I may have done a commission for him once, seven years ago or so.”

Seven years ago?  The time frame was accurate—it was the year of meeting John and of first hearing the name ‘Moriarty’ from a dying cabbie’s lips.  “Ah,” I said, the connection clicking.  “I am familiar with your work.  Though it is hardly an exercise of talent—any amateur poisoner could craft such pills.”

The man shrugged.  “I was learning at the time.”

I was still holding the offensive iris, not entirely sure what I was supposed to do with it.  “I appreciate your puerile attempt at humour,” I rumbled, reaching past him to place the plant back on the counter.

The first hint of a smile crossed his lips, self-satisfied and smug.  “ _De rien_.”

I fixed him with a glare, one hand still on the counter, effectively crowding him.  Despising him was as effortless as gulping water.  “What do you want?”

“ _Rien du tout_ ,” he retorted.  Nothing at all.

“Stop that,” I snapped.  “Your friend told me you wanted the honour of explaining the whys and hows.  Here’s your chance.  Explain.”

Crick furrowed his eyebrows.  “Did Shoon say that?  Ah, _bon_ , I can see why he would.  He is right in a way.”  He sighed, brushed past me, and crossed to the door, flipping the ‘open’ sign over to ‘closed.’  “As for the hows, Mister Holmes, I am sure you are clever enough to figure out some of the functional details.”

“Poison, obviously,” I said.  “When idiots find an obvious and common poison, they fail to look for a more lethal second.  A masking technique, used to hide or disguise signature chemicals that can be traced back more easily to the poisoner.”

“ _Bien_.”  Crick fastened the lock on the door and turned to face me.  “Yet you do not know the second poison, correct?”

I didn’t need to answer; he obviously would answer it on his own.  I held my ground, back to the iris, face to my opponent.

He tilted his head to one side, contemplative.  “No, you would not know.  How could you?”  He crossed the room and picked up a stool near the register, dropping it near me.  “Sit, _Mister_ Holmes.  We have to wait.”  He leaned against the counter’s edge near the register, standing at the midpoint between me and the workroom door.  He drummed a rhythm against the granite with his fingertips as he looked at me.

I did not sit on the stool.  “Wait for what?” I asked.

Here he smiled in full form, and the most alarming thing about it was how ordinary and boring it appeared, as if he had merely shared a tasteless joke.  The crow’s feet around his eyes crinkled.  Never trust a man with an ordinary smile when he has unknown intentions.

“Wait for _whom_ , Mister Holmes.”

“Your associate?”

“Perhaps.”

“John?”

A dimple appeared in his cheek.

“What do you want with him?”

“I want nothing from him.”

“ _Stop it_ ,” I hissed, shoving the stool aside with a clatter.  “These word games are getting ridiculous.”

“I am speaking plainly, Mister Holmes, you are just not paying attention.  Do you want to know the second poison?”  He folded his arms across his chest.

“If you’d be so _kind_ ,” I said sourly.

Crick pulled a small vial out of his shirt pocket, and it contained three seeds in it.  “They are from a curious plant, one the Western world is fairly clueless about.  It is well known in India— _Cerbera odollam_ , though locally they call it the Suicide Tree.  The toxins are particularly difficult to detect in an autopsy.  It disrupts the heartbeat.  Very fast.[17]”  He repocketed the vial and shrugged.  “Animals can be remarkably stupid about the things people feed them.”

“And presumably you accomplished this slaughter and the field design with the aid of some sort of aerial device.”

Crick smiled.  “No, I did it with makeshift skis fashioned out of clothing irons.”

My eyes drifted to the iris before snapping back to Crick.  “I am not in the mood for jokes.”

“ _Quel dommage_.  A humourless man is a poor conversationalist.”  He hummed softly.  “But yes, the simplest answer is often the most correct.  I dabbled in aeronautics before I pursued my current line of work.  The craft is easy to operate.”

That explained the pilot’s callus on his thumb.  “Then I assume you kept the pig carcasses for a practical purpose—fertiliser, perhaps?”

“Correct.  The fungi like them in particular.”

“And why ten percent?” I asked.  My head throbbed.  So much for analgesics.

“Surely you have a guess?  I can’t just _give_ you all the answers, _détective_ ,” he countered, looking bemused.

I had at least six different guesses, and none of them fit.  “I came here for answers, not for riddles.”

Crick smirked and tutted.  “You came running in blind.  That was not a smart thing to do.”  He tapped a finger contemplatively on his chin, and his eyes swept up and down my figure before locking with my gaze.  “Perhaps you have something else on your mind?”

I felt myself blushing, John invading my thoughts, and I inhaled sharply and told myself to divorce those feelings.  John was safe.  Mycroft would have texted me otherwise.  I took another deep breath and scanned the man across me and the room before I retaliated, “You’re short-sighted, hence your glasses and the larger print on the price tags of each of the flowers.  Although you grew up in Paris, you’ve been travelling abroad for at least a decade, settling in this business in London for only the past year—paint still relatively new on the walls; there’s a prominent tan on your neck and arms but none on your face, so somewhere with a lot of sun where you would sensibly wear a hat but it wasn’t enough to shield your neck.  Considering you’ve just informed me of a poison that’s more prominent in India and your acquaintance with Dr. Elliston, I can only assume India.  I can see that you have a pair of shears in your back trouser pocket but other than that and your poisonous seeds, you’re unarmed.  You’ve placed yourself in between me and the door to the back room, and that slight twitch you made when I said that just now surely means your companion is back there.  Dr. Elliston, won’t you come out for a chat, then?  Two men against one—the odds are in your favour.”

I smiled as Elliston emerged from the back room, his hands raised in front of him with an amused glimmer in his eyes.

“Gentlemen, I may not understand your motives, but I am far from blind,” I said.

Elliston sent Crick a knowing glance.  “I _did_ warn you not to underestimate him,” he said.

Crick snorted and pushed his glasses up his nose.  “Except he has missed the most obvious thing in the room.”  He cast a faintly annoyed glance at his companion.  “I thought we agreed to keep you out of sight, Shoon.  Anyone walking by the display case can see you.”

Elliston shrugged.  “It hardly matters now.  He’ll be arriving soon.”

“If you mean John,” I cut in.  “He won’t be joining us.  He’s currently under the protection of the British Government, which I’ve been told cannot be so easily infiltrated or evaded.”

“I wouldn’t be so certain of that, Mr. Holmes,” Elliston said, folding his arms and smiling blithely.  “ _I_ seem to have managed pretty well with that feat.”

Crick rolled his eyes.  “Don’t exaggerate, Shoon, you had help.”

I looked between them.  Crick was still standing between me and Elliston, keeping his companion behind the register and positioned to the nearest exit—protective impulse, at least partially deliberate.  Distance between them was rather close for the casual or working acquaintance, and their torsos had unconsciously angled towards one another—an intimate investment, then.  So I was right on that count.

But there was an oddity here, something hiding just out of the corner of my eye.  It was the way they were standing, the expression in their eyes as they looked at me.  Elliston was calm, with the gaze of a man who knew exactly how the chess game would end; Crick was confident, with the gaze of one who knew how to _win_ the game.  And yet...something was not right.

“Gentlemen,” I said, keeping my tone neutral.  “You obviously have a good reason for luring me here under the pretence of all these dramatics—I am the bait for your target.  Mr. Crick.” My eyes flicked to the Frenchman.  “What do you want with John?”

Crick smirked and said, “You are so quick to assume things, aren’t you?”

I bristled.  “I don’t _assume_ , I _observe._   And what I’m observing is that you’re trying to stall for time which _will not work_.  Your _friend_ here may be able to escape the incompetency of Scotland Yard with your help, but as for John—”

The door crashed open, kicked in hard enough to splinter the frame.  John stood in the doorway, chest heaving, sweat trickling down his forehead.  He aimed his gun steadily at the two other men.  “Nobody move,” he panted, furious.  He looked like he’d sprinted a full kilometre.

“For god’s sake, John,” I hissed.  The idiot—the stupid, stupid idiot, he was supposed to be locked under Mycroft’s scrutiny, not _walking into the bloody trap!_

“ _You_ ,” John snapped, glaring fiercely at me.  “Shut the hell up.  What the _bloody hell_ did you think—I _told_ you to stay in bed, Sherlock.  Not sic your brother on me and run off and face them on your own!”

And stupid, _useless_ Mycroft, couldn’t he for once actually kidnap people properly?  Or at least _warn_ _me_ when...  I’d stuffed my hand into a coat pocket only to realise my phone wasn’t there.  With chilling clarity, I remembered that I’d left the phone—stupid, _stupid_!  What the _hell_ was wrong with me?—on the bed.

“Dr. Watson,” Elliston said, his hands still raised defensively in the air.  “It’s been quite some time.”

John fixed the line of the gun muzzle on the vet.  He blinked, then _looked_.  “Crick.  Jack Crick,” he answered, gaping straight at Elliston.

I reflexively snapped my gaze toward the Frenchman, the false Crick, to find him smiling in my direction and gesturing toward his nametag— _Laval Vacher_.  Dear God.  It was _the_ most obvious thing in the room.  The most blatant, _obvious_ thing, and I’d _missed_ it—I slammed my fist down on the counter, knocking the iris vial over to shatter on the floor, and in the next second I felt a hand clamping down on the back of my neck, and my brain cells ignited with pain.

I must have screamed—I’d never felt anything like it before, like a thousand molten needles had been stabbed into my cerebral cortex and pushed deep down.  When I regained sight, I found my head pulled partway across the counter, with the hands of Sunyata Elliston—a.k.a. Jack Crick—affixed across my neck.  One hand pinched across the front, threatening to close off my airway; the other hand firmly gripped the area where my medulla oblongata resided.  I weakly raised a hand to pull off the hand around my neck, but Elliston simply pushed down, hard, and my wobbling centre of gravity collapsed; I gripped the counter to stop myself from falling on it completely.

John was pointing the gun straight over my head, assumedly into Crick’s face, and he growled, “ _Let him go_.”  The lights in the room flickered.

“If you shoot me, I will kill him,” Elliston answered calmly, squeezing across my neck.  I gasped for air.

John took a deep breath.  “Fine, I’ll kill _him_ then,” he said, swinging the gun over to the imposter—Vacher.  The Frenchman raised his hands higher.

“And I will still kill _your_ friend,” Elliston snapped.  The lights flickered again.

John shifted his posture briefly and licked his lips.  “So we’re at a stand-off then.”

“No we’re not, Watson.  I still have a pair of hands free.”

Vacher walked over to John and gestured for him to hand over the weapon.  John gave me a brief, worried glance, then gave it to him with a resigned sigh.  Vacher took the weapon and moved out of my line of sight, presumably behind the counter next to Elliston/Crick, from the sound of his footsteps.

For twenty seconds, there was dead silence in the florist shop—where the opera recordings had gone I couldn’t say.  All I could see was John standing across the room, his gaze flicking from an icy stare directed above my head to a highly concerned one directed toward me.  I made another attempt to free myself, only to have a fresh wave of stinging nettles lashed across my brain, with the firm command _‘Be still_ ’ echoing inside my skull.

“Stop it!” John snapped, taking a step closer.  Elliston’s hands tightened.

“I’ll stop when he stops being difficult,” Crick replied.

I stilled; so did John.  John took a deep breath.  “Right.  Okay.  So...so if you’re _voltem_ , why couldn’t I sense it, all those years ago?  Why not say something before then?”

Crick sighed; I felt his breath brush across the top of my head.  “I am _voltem_ , Watson.  One of the ten percent.”

John suddenly started back, eyes wide.  “Oh.  Oh god.”

“John,” I croaked, willing him to explain what was happening—all of this impossible, unknowable data; indecipherable implications; the fire in my head; _how_ ; why I was broken in my most important facility; why he had stepped away.

I felt Crick’s fingers drum thoughtfully across my neck.  “Mr. Holmes is feeling rather left in the dark.  Would you like to explain things for him, or shall I?” Crick said.

“ _Shoon_ ,” hissed Vacher, somewhere over my shoulder.  “We do not have the time for pleasantries.  It is likely that Doctor Watson has called the police before his arrival.  Make him power the ship so we can leave.”

I could only see John’s face, but he suddenly looked extremely confused.

Crick’s voice, when it responded, sounded heavy, “Oh _jaan._[18]”

“What?” Vacher snapped.  “What have you not told me?”

“The ship cannot be powered to warp capacity again.  The makers designed it so the function would be permanently disabled after the initial voyage.”

“Then what is the point of this?” Vacher said, a tinge of alarm entering his voice.

I made another move to release myself from Crick’s grip, managing to pull off the hand around my throat, but suddenly my legs gave out as another wave of pain flooded from my spine downward and my elbows crashed back into the counter.

“ _Be still_ ,” Crick growled into my ear.

An overhead light in the corner of the room abruptly shattered, and the other lights around it flickered wildly.  John had taken several steps forward, but his hands were back in the air as assumedly the gun was pointed back on him.  “What the hell do you want?” John said, in a deceptively calm tone I knew too well.  “I hope to God it isn’t—”

“It is,” Crick said.  “Watson, I want nothing.”

“No,” John replied.

“Then I will shut down Mr. Holmes’s autonomic functions,” Crick countered.

“Shoon, _what have you not told me?_ ”

Crick sighed and sucked in a breath, the tension in his hands unyielding.  “ _Jaan_ , you remember when I told you that I am the equivalent of a leper back home?”

“...Yes,” Vacher said hesitantly, then added, with a dash of malice, “And that your fellow afflicted were forcibly exiled because of it.”

“To M-class planets,” John cut in.  “Where we knew you could survive, with plenty of mind waves to sustain yourselves with.”  He licked his lips and added quietly, “My parents were physicians, sent to monitor the Sol-sector positronians and make sure they were still thriving among the Earthlings.  But we got here and couldn’t find them.  We assumed they’d died somehow.”

“No,” Crick said.  “Not dead.  We blended in—our electrical signatures were too similar to humans’.”

“We sent out signals for you to find us,” John said.  “We sent them out for _years._ ”

“We didn’t reply,” Crick answered evenly.  “And why should we have?  It was not so long ago that your lot were burning us.  You exiled us against our wishes.  We had no reason to trust you then.”

The frown lines on John’s face deepened.  He lowered his hands to his sides, and his shoulders drooped.  There were so many strange terms being thrown about, and my head and the muscles in my arms were aching; Crick’s hands remained secure around my skull.  John’s hands were flexing at his sides.  He looked at me, and his expression seemed immensely despondent.  It filled me with a stark sense of foreboding.

“John,” I murmured.

“Please, just let him go,” John said, gaze flicking upwards.  “He has nothing to do with this.”

“No, but I suspect he will be affected,” Crick said, his voice gentle.  A pause, then, “As will you, _jaan_.  I am...I am old, now.  It’s been two hundred years since I saw my home sands.  I want to see them again.”

“Yes, that was the plan,” said the Frenchman, sounding miffed.  “And since we can’t, apparently, we should _leave_ _before the police arrive_.”

“There is one method left to us,” Crick said.

John blinked and shook his head.  He looked at me again and must have seen the plea for answers in my eyes.  “We—the _voltem_ —we mimic the electromagnetic forces of the universe,” John explained.  “We react and respond to our environments and other people based on electromagnetic interactions.  Most of us—about ninety percent of us—have roughly the same signature charge, a negative one.  But there’s a genetic defect in about ten percent of the population that makes the body-signature charge positive.”  John nodded upwards.  “He’s a positive one.  When a positive _voltem_ and a negative _voltem_ make contact, they...”  He swallowed and blinked some more.  “...annihilate.”

“And in turn become _light_ , the fastest thing there is, outside of warp capacity ships,[19]” Crick said.  I felt his fingers grip tighter around my neck.  “Annihilation is our fastest ticket home, Watson, and you know it.”

A whisper: “Shoon.”

“I’m sorry,” Crick murmured back.  “If I had told you before, you would have refused to help.”

“I haven’t agreed to this,” John cut in gruffly.

“You will, and soon.  I can’t let the police arrive before we leave,” Crick retorted.  His grip finally pushed hard enough on my neck that I coughed for air.  “I can see in your eyes that you’re a different man than the one I met all those years ago in the lab.  You have the same emptiness as I do now, the same loss.  When you lose the life you cherish, you wander with nowhere to go.  You’ve wandered, haven’t you?  I know you have.”

John’s eyes flickered to me and lingered.  He blinked several times, and the lights shimmered.  He nodded stiffly.

“And home world’s abandoned us, haven’t they?” Crick urged.  “Your parents would not have stayed here if they had thought their subjects were dead.”

John nodded again.  “We discovered our ship had suffered the same treatment as yours.”  He quirked his lips in a sardonic smile.  “Seems home world didn’t want to risk us bringing one of you back somehow.”

“And they all leave us,” Crick said.  He took a deep breath and sighed.  When he spoke again, his voice had the strained edge of a man withholding tears.  “Believe me, I know it too.  I’ve been here longer than you, and I know you’ve lived through the same.  You fight it for awhile, and then you start to get used to it.  You start learning to live here.  You fall in love with the people, and you think they are the key to a new home, and then they die.  Sickness, war, old age—they are made of much frailer stuff than we are, for all their thorns.  So you despair.  You try again.  You think _this_ time, maybe, _this_ time it will work, but it doesn’t work.  They leave, and you drag yourself through it again and again.  It doesn’t get easier.  You start to wonder, what’s the point in trying?”  He sucked in another breath, and on the exhale it came out almost like a laugh.  “It’s been two hundred years, and I’m just so...tired.  Aren’t you?”

I watched as John’s eyes became more and more hollow, as though he were looking into a space that was not present, and one hand was gripping the cloth covering his psychosomatic leg.  He nodded along absently with Crick’s words, not even aware he was doing it, and he took a step forward.  For the first time, I could see all one hundred and forty-eight years settling in his skin, his posture.  He was getting sucked back in, back to that hollowness I’d seen in him the day we met, and on the day we met again.  That look in his eyes, the one I never wanted to see again.  He took another step.

“John,” I choked out, reaching a hand out toward him, to redirect him.  “ _John._ ”

A gunshot erupted behind me.  I slumped to the floor, warm blood splattered across my neck.  My ears were ringing.

“ _Sherlock!_ ”  John was next to me, pulling me into his arms, dragging me away from the counter.  He held my head in his hands, his gaze flickering over my face, fingers probing my skull and neck and back.  “Oh thank god,” he whispered.

I tore my face away from him to look behind me, to see nothing but a prominent blood splatter across the wall and an empty counter.  But we could still hear them.

“ _Bête,_ _m_ _on sot_ ,” Vacher said.  “I told you—I promised you—didn’t you listen?  _Je t’avais promis, ‘quand tu regrettes trop ta_ _planète, je te rendrai à la terre dont tu es sorti.’ **Moi.**   Moi-même, mon sot._”[20]

A cough.  Crick whispered something.

“ _It better damn well take you longer to get there_ ,” Vacher shouted.  John’s arms tightened around me.  “ _Laisse-moi le temps de te rattraper! **[21]**_ ”

Another cough, and the single syllable of a lost word.

Silence, a heavy breath, and then Vacher emerged standing behind the counter, his clothing stained in blood and red fingerprints smeared across his cheek.  He wobbled as he stepped away, then spotted us.  He distractedly aimed John’s gun in our direction and adjusted his glasses with a trembling hand.  “ _Bon, messieurs_ ,” he said hoarsely.

I’d never thought the sound of rapidly approaching police sirens and screeching tyres would be so welcome.  I breathed out; John merely clamped his arms tighter around me.

Vacher heaved one shaky sigh, then lowered the gun and set it on the counter.  He placed a hand over his eyes and murmured, as Lestrade and company entered the room, “I told him to mind the police.  I _told_ him.  But they never do listen, do they?  He never listened to a word I said.”

 

* * *

  
[16] Austin, Claire.  _Irises: A Gardener's Encyclopedia_.  Portland, OR: Timber Press, 2005.  185.  [[Image Reference](http://www.botmuc.de/jpg/schachen_2010-07-07/iris_reichenbachii.jpg)]

[17] Gaillard Y., Krishnamoorthy A., Bevalot F.  “ _Cerbera odollam_ : a 'suicide tree' and cause of death in the state of Kerala, India.”   _Journal of Ethnopharmacology_ 95 (2004):123-6.

—Article abstract: “ _Cerbera odollam_ is a tree belonging to the poisonous Apocynaceae family, which includes the yellow and common oleanders. The seeds are excessively toxic, containing cerberin as the main active cardenolide. _Cerbera venenifera_ , a related species found in Madagascar, has a long history as an ordeal poison, and was responsible for the death of 3000 people per year in previous centuries. The odollam tree is responsible for about 50% of the plant poisoning cases and 10% of the total poisoning cases in Kerala, India. It is used both for suicide and homicide. The aim of this retrospective study is to call attention to a powerful toxic plant that is currently completely ignored by western physicians, chemists, analysts and even coroners and forensic toxicologists.”  Apparently it is _still_ ignored, considering the article is more than ten years old now.  Perhaps I should write a blog post about this, at least.

[18] Punjabi term of endearment, generally meaning “darling” or “dear,” though the word itself translates literally as “life.”

[19] The process described mimics electron-positron annihilation, in which an electron collides with its antimatter counterpart, the positron, destroying both particles and releasing their energy in the form of photons, a quantum of electromagnetic radiation. [L. Sodickson, W. Bowman, J. Stephenson, R. Weinstein (1960). "Single-Quantum Annihilation of Positrons". _Physical Review_ 124: 1851.]

[20] “I had promised you, ‘when you miss your planet too much, I will return you to the land which you left.’  Me.  Myself, my fool. ”

[21] “Give me the time to catch up with you!”


	8. Conclusion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **A/N** : Just letting you know--I've done some editing on Chapter 7 (the previous chapter) since it was first published. Nothing's changed in terms of content, but I've done some small edits in the hopes that it'll be at least marginally clearer in terms of blocking, etc. (hopefully!). TBH, I'm probably going to be doing edits on that chapter for the rest of time, because it is my problem child. But enough about that. _This_ chapter, on the other hand, is my darling golden child, so I hope you enjoy it! :-)

The cab ride home was grating; we passed it in silence.  John had stolen a hold of my hand.  I let him, if only because there was hardly a point to refuse it any longer.  I was glaring out the window.

How many errors had I committed, due solely to the distraction of my own infatuation?  How many errors that had not only cost me the possibility of holding an advantage over my opponents, but had also prevented me from solving the case and which had nearly cost John’s life?

 

> 1.  I had forgotten my phone, from which I could have received texts from Mycroft, from which I could have phoned Lestrade, from which I could have done a hell of a lot more if I had _had_ it.
> 
> 2.  I had forgotten to seek out a weapon to bring with me—even though I knew _now_ that John had taken his gun, I could’ve at least brought _something._   A knife.  Anything _._
> 
> 3.  I hadn’t entered the shop with any sort of façade, from which I could have been able to glean more information from Vacher, probably.
> 
> 4.  Why didn’t I realise that if John had known Crick from university in 1901, then _of course_ he’d have more in common with the veterinarian than with the florist.  _Stupid._   I could have solved the whole case just with that!  Where the _hell_ was my mind during all of this?
> 
> 5.  I didn’t even look at the man’s _bloody name tag right in front of my nose_ , from which I could have solved it.
> 
>            5a.  I had let my anger get the better of me, allowing Crick to put me in a hostage position when my guard was down.
> 
>            5b.  Consequentially forcing John to _seriously consider_ doing the unthinkable to protect me.
> 
> 6.  I had discounted the possibility that the formations were spelling out a message right from the start.  A simple reference search concerning DNA might have solved the entire thing.
> 
> 7.  I had fallen for the decoy in York.
> 
> 8.  Why hadn’t I simply asked John more questions about his people?  Why hadn’t I even asked him _how he came to be here_?  Would that not have solved the entire thing?  We had all that time on the train back, but no, I was stupidly worrying that he would _hold my hand_ and distract me when it was so very _obvious_ that the murderers had something to do with John’s alien background.  I hadn’t asked the right questions, _refused to think of asking them_ because I was too busy avoiding thinking about the _man_.

 

It was far too many errors to be acceptable.  The case had become an absolute _wreck_ , a potential gem crushed into dust.  And John had nearly...ceased.  What could possibly justify the price that this... _degeneracy_ had nearly cost?

With a sudden jolt, the cab had stopped in front of Baker Street, and I got out, letting John pay the fare as I removed myself to our flat.  I ignored Mrs. Hudson’s drivel and stormed up the stairs and into my room, slamming the door behind me.

I sat on my bed, saw my phone resting on it, and threw it at the wall.  It made a satisfying noise.  I eyed the bottle of paracetamol and threw it at the wall too, for all the good _it_ had done me.  I threw the glass of water, and it made the best noise out of all of them.

A knock at the door.  “Sherlock?”  When I didn’t answer, John opened the door anyway.  He raised an eyebrow.  “Are you done?”

I glared at the wall, where water was running down the wallpaper.

He sighed and I listened to him step away, only to return with a dustpan as he swept up the glass.  I watched him, and a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach emerged at the sight of him moving, the soft sounds of him being alive, sensory inputs that had been nearly dispelled not forty minutes prior.  I turned my gaze away.

But suddenly it was impossible to ignore him as he was standing directly in front of me.  His hand touched my shoulder, and I flinched and stood up, moving away from him to pace the floor.

“Sherlock.”

My pacing was interrupted by John blocking my path.  He fastened a hand on my elbow.

“Sherlock, the case is over.”

“ _Yes_ , John, I’m well aware,” I snapped, ripping my arm from his grip and turning to the bookshelf, setting my eyes on the bust of Goethe.

“And...?  Isn’t that good, then?  Case solved, we live to see another day?”

I barked out a bitter, brief laugh.  “ _Solved?_   You call that _solved_?  John, that was mindless blundering, that was anything _but_ ‘solved’!  This case was an absolute _mess!_ ” I shouted, whirling on him.  “This is the worst travesty against the deductive arts I’ve ever closed.  How could I possibly gain any sort of satisfaction from it?”

John’s face went from concerned to thunderous in record time.  “Oh, _you’re_ the one who’s angry?” he spat.  “ _You’re_ the one who’s been scared to death about what could have happened to you?  No, Sherlock, _you’re_ the bloody idiot who just took off, _again_ , not bloody thinking about what you were going up against.  _You’re_ the one who broke his bloody promise _never to do this to me again!_ ”

“ _Yes_ ,” I hissed back at him.  “You think I was doing this just to be clever?  You think I wasn’t worried about what would happen to you?  You think I’m not _aware_ of how compromised I was because of you?”

“Is that what I am to you, then?” John retorted, cross beyond belief.  “A hazard?  Oh yes, John, stick around and tell me how brilliant I am but when things get serious I need you out of the way.  Like I’m a bloody—”  He raised his hands, an aborted gesture.  “— _child_ , or something?”

“In this case, _yes_ ,” I said, glaring at him.  “Because you were the _target_ , John.  Do forgive me for trying to protect you from unknown criminals wanting to inflict god-knows-what, it won’t happen again.”

I tried to move past him, feeling suffocated by the atmosphere, wanting to just walk and walk the streets of London and forget everything—when John yanked the front of my shirt and forced me to meet his gaze.  He breathed harshly, eyes shining with moisture.

“The last time, Sherlock—the last time you shut me out to protect me, I thought you were dead.  Do you not understand?” he said, voice low and hoarse.  His other hand joined the first in clenching my shirt, as if to ensure I couldn’t escape.  “Do you not understand what that would have done to me if that had happened again?”

“Do _you_ understand what the alternative would have done to me?” I countered, my hands coming up to grip his knuckles.

We glared at each other, hands locked over one another, fury fed by rehashed fears.  John was shaking.  I could hear my pulse thundering.  I took a deep breath and hissed it out through my teeth.

“John.  Because of my feelings for you, I made critical errors in judgment that cost us this case and nearly your life, and I refuse for this to happen again,” I said, a fresh wave of self-fury pumping through my veins.  “It would be in our best interest if—”

“ _No_ ,” John growled, his nails biting into my chest.  “Don’t you fucking _dare_ think about calling this off, Sherlock.  Not for that.”

“And what then, John?” I snapped.  “Should I give up cases now because I can’t solve them?”

“Don’t be an idiot, of course you can solve them.”

I snorted.  “My trial run of juggling mindsets has shown me to be inadequate.”

“For Christ’s sakes, it’s because you’re new at it.  Give yourself time to adjust, it’s been _two days_.”

“And when will the next case be, John?” I said, pushing against him and making him take a step back, though he didn’t relinquish my shirt.  “Will it be tomorrow?  Will I be ready _then?_   A week from now?  What if, in the heat of the moment, I become so _paralysed_ fearing for your safety that I can’t do anything useful whatsoever?  What if, a week from now, someone _dies_ because I was far too distracted stuffing my tongue down your throat to connect the clues?  What then?”

“Then I won’t distract you.  And I can damn well fend for myself, Sherlock, and you know it.”

I shoved at John again, this time successfully disengaging him.  “You don’t _understand_ , John.”

“No, Sherlock, _you_ don’t understand.  Do you know why Crick died today?” John said, folding his arms and blocking me whenever I tried to move past him.

I rolled my eyes.  “Because his lover shot him.”

“No.  It was because he was so wrapped up in his own isolation he couldn’t see the man standing next to him.”

I blinked.  John sighed, the rigid frown lines in his face relaxing marginally, and his folded arms dropped to his sides.

“You couldn’t see his face, Sherlock, but that Frenchman was devastated.  Betrayed, even.”  John’s eyes dipped to my sternum.  “He thought they were working for the same thing.”

“No...” I said, contemplating.  The thing out of the corner of my eye that I had seen in the florist shop was coming into a sharper focus.  I raised my vision to the ceiling, scanning through the recent memory, interpreting.  “No, I think I did see it...in a sense.  Before you arrived.  There was resignation in Crick’s eyes, but Vacher’s were triumphant.  I did not understand what it meant, then.  But now it is clear that they were planning for different outcomes.”  I lowered my gaze to meet John’s.  “For a man who was so assured of his success, I can understand the disappointment he must have felt, to have the man he cherished abandon him.  And for another man, even.”

John coloured.  “It wasn’t like that.  Between me and Crick.  It never was.”

I snorted and felt a half-smile escape my lips.  “No, of course not.”  For a moment, the ghost of a memory emerged, when I had stood on a rooftop and shaken a spider’s hand.  “But death is a very intimate thing,” I murmured.  “To be the one who ends another is a special privilege, and Crick had reserved _you_ that honour, John.  I expect the Frenchman was jealous.”

For a long moment, we simply stared at each other.  Then John took a step forward and we were wrapped in an embrace.  He was shaking, and I held him tighter and breathed in the scent of his hair.  His arms felt blessedly solid across my back, his breath warm against my chest.

“You can’t ever do this to me again, Sherlock.  Don’t ever do this to me again,” John was mumbling into my shirt.

“Never,” I whispered.  He lifted his face to mine and there was a kiss, and I’m half-certain I initiated it though my memory can’t be relied upon in that instance.  For a moment I waited for the backlash, the strident shrieking of my mind in protest, but it never came.  We pulled back a moment and I was treated to the close-up view of John’s eyes, that brief translucent shimmer, and in the next moment we were kissing again.  Kissing a seal onto a promise.  And kissing again, hands magnetized to one another’s skin.

With a soft thump, I sat on the bed, half-pulling John down with me.  He shifted to the side and sat beside me, one hand carding through my hair.  We smiled carefully at each other.

“Are you all right?” John murmured.

“Yes.”  I placed my hand over his, holding it in place over my cheek.  What glorious calluses he had.

“Do you mind if I see?” he asked.

I crinkled my eyebrows in confusion; he tapped a finger against my skull in answer.

“It’s been through a lot today,” John explained.  “I’d like to do a peripheral scan at least, make sure there isn’t anything damaged.”

I hesitated, recalling the stabbing agony Crick had inflicted.  But then again, this was _John_.  “All right,” I agreed.

John leant forward and gently tapped his forehead to mine, closing his eyes.  I was wondering what was supposed to happen when all at once I felt it—a sensation as though my brain was being caressed by a cool, soft cloth.  Vaguely tingling.  Refreshing even, like the inside of my skull was being washed in a mint-scented bath.  I felt knots I didn’t know I had in my neck unravel on their own, my legs suddenly jelly.

“Oh god,” I breathed.

John immediately pulled back, and the sensation abruptly ended.  “Sorry, sorry,” he said.  “You okay?”

I grabbed his neck and pulled him back in.  “Yes.  Fine.  More than fine.  Do it again.”

A pause, and then the sensation returned, cool, clear, soothing, exhilarating.  “God in heaven,” I whispered.

“This is doing something for you, is it?” John said, amused.

“It’s like a cooling fan,” I murmured, feeling weird but pleasant tingles sweeping back and forth across the two hemispheres, then front to back.

“Mm, well, with a hard-drive like yours, I’m not surprised you’re overheated in there.  Just a sec, let me see if I can find it—ah, there we go.”

All at once, the cooling, tingling feeling was _everywhere_ , spreading out from my spine into my arms and legs and stomach and neck and kneecaps and toes and fingertips.  I moaned something, I don’t even know what.  Tense muscles near my scapulae loosened; my shoulders dropped.  A coil of nervous energy, wound up somewhere below my sternum, rapidly shook itself out, transforming into a warm-blooded pulse that flooded my thighs, chest, and forehead.  I pulled John’s head closer, pressing his nose into mine, seeking his mouth.  I found his tongue before I found his lips and ensnared it with my own, and John made a delicious noise at the contact, half a whimper and half a sigh.  The skin on my arms and neck broke out in gooseflesh, and a faint buzz as if I had shocked myself with a light socket burst into my limbs, making me gasp.  John’s tongue stroked the hard palate at the roof of my mouth, and I shivered.

We pulled back for air, panting, hands dropping from respective necks to rest on lower arms.  A strange but not unpleasant haze was clouding my thoughts, and my skin felt remarkably _alive_ , warm where John’s hands lingered.  John was practically glowing, his mouth glistening.  He licked his lips, and I nearly chased that tongue back into his mouth.

“Well,” John said, clearing his throat a little.  “Well, everything seems to be in order.  No damage that I could sense.”

“Good,” I said, perhaps huskier than I’d intended (but of no matter, not anymore).

John gulped at that.  He licked his lips again, and I jerked toward his mouth, only to find John’s hand arresting my shoulder.  I sent him a puzzled look. 

“Sherlock, I—are you sure?  I mean, _really_ sure?” John said, his eyes suddenly serious.  “’Cause I can’t keep going on mixed signals for the rest of my life, Sherlock.  I don’t think I have the heart for it anymore.”

I could see that he meant it, not just in the tone of his voice but also in his posture.  There was a dim vulnerability in the tense line of his shoulders that I’d never seen in all the years I’d known him and indeed would never see again.  His face was heavy with frown lines, and I felt the tremor in his hand as it rested on my arm.

There would be so many difficulties in this.  I knew even then that there would be days where John would resent me for how I would prioritise a case over him, for prioritising clues over human decency, but that was hardly _new_.  That had existed before.  What would be new would be that the change between us would make _me_ feel guilty for how I prioritised things over John, how that niggling self-reproach at the back of my mind would make concentration difficult, how I would lash out in frustration, how I would, on some days, even resent _John_.  Resent him for placing this sense of responsibility on me, for not understanding me, for distracting me with guilt, for distracting me with worry, for distracting me with affection, for distracting me, period.

But the difficulties wouldn’t be every day.  There would be as many—if not more—days where, as before and as always, we would sync together.  Where I would cherish him for his conductive thoughts, his quick reflexes, his sense of humour, his presence next to me.  And John in turn would call me brilliant, radiating the excitement of a fascinating case, and look at me with that bright and consuming gaze.  There would be countless days where we would do nothing but watch telly, have tea, have sex, and squabble good-naturedly over who should do the shopping.  There was no question there would be good days.

But the crux of the matter lay in the answer to another question I’d been asked years ago—when John had asked me why I even bothered coming back.  The answer then had come as naturally as it should have been coming in this moment, if not for the heavy lump in my throat.  Because for all my wanderings, if The Work had truly been _all_ that mattered, I could have stayed anywhere I’d landed—I could have stayed in Calcutta, in Lhasa, in Stockholm, in Chicago, in Caracas, in Vilnius, and it would not have mattered.  I’d severed my ties; I no longer had obligations to any other person in the world (aside from my protuberance of a brother, and Molly, who’d told me in no uncertain terms that I had to write her sometimes, just to let her know I was alive).  I could have worked unfettered, and I could have gone on pretending that I was detached from the world.  But I’d come back to London.

I’d come back for John, because John made The Work better, made _me_ better than I was before; John was the whetstone I needed for my mind, and his absence was an aching distraction greater than the distraction of his presence.  John Watson was not an easy solution—he never would be—but he was the only one.

I kept my eyes locked on his as I moved one of my hands down his chest to rest over the spot where his locket and ID tags were hanging, where the formation of John Watson could be felt so keenly.  John seemed to have stopped breathing.

“John,” I said.  “I am so certain.”

He swallowed, blinking rapidly, and a hand fastened overtop mine, pressing so that I could feel his heart battering against his ribs.  I felt mine skip in sympathy.

“Sherlock, I...me too,” he said with a nod.

For a moment, everything seemed to slide in slow motion.  We’d drifted backwards to lie on top of the mattress; I’d pulled John over me, to feel the weight of him resting snugly against my thighs and stomach.  Dragging my hands across his back and tugging him down, I could feel the bump of his vertebrae beneath my fingers.  He smiled, a smile I’d seen so many times in a cab, at a crime scene, in our living room, but never with my bedroom ceiling as a backdrop—the light relit him in a softer angle.  Then he descended, lips meeting mine once again, and time had no meaning.  He was warm breath, a soft and probing tongue, a heartbeat beneath my hands, serotonin unleashed.

I shifted to his neck, trailing my lips over the stubbled grit there, tasting salt and skin and the faintest traces of aftershave.  His pulse fluttered at the carotid and I sucked at it briefly, drawing a gasp.  John was kissing somewhere near my temple, breathing unsteadily into my ear.  He whispered my name; I hugged him closer, suddenly realising with a jolt that not only was he hard and hot against my hip, but apparently I was as well.  The sensation conjured a series of realisations: the realisation that I could _actually_ have this, that _we_ could have this, that the disastrous attempt from before wouldn’t repeat itself, that yes _now_ was the moment— _the_ singular moment where life would change for us.  I canted my hips up into him, stuttering at the contact, hearing John groan and feeling him rock back into me.

“Sh-Sherlock,” John whispered, his Adam’s apple shifting prominently as he gulped and licked his lips.  “I, uh, I didn’t exactly get the chance to, ah, to— _oh Christ_ ,” he moaned as I wrapped my legs around him and thrust, hoping that would get him to concentrate properly.  “To, ah, get the thing you asked for,” he finished.

My mind went momentarily blank as I tried to figure out what the hell he was talking about before it clicked—carton of lube, I’d said.  I snorted, amused.  “I’m sure we’ll manage,” I purred into his ear, pitching my tone as low as it would go.

John made a strangled noise, and the bed lamp flickered wildly.  I glanced at it in confusion.  Suddenly John half-rolled his torso away from me, and I reflexively clenched my legs tighter around him only to shift onto my side along with him.  John flung an arm toward the lamp and managed to turn it off on the third try.  I frowned as the room plunged into darkness.

“John, what the hell?” I demanded, curling toward him.  “I’d prefer it on.”

He sighed, and I immediately felt reassured as his arm coiled back around me.  “Sorry, but it’s better for the lamp if I turn it off.  Unless you find strobe lighting sexy.”

My raised eyebrow was undoubtedly lost on him, so instead I asked, “How—?”

His lips cut me off, then he said, “I’ll explain later.  We have something a bit more immediate on the agenda, don’t we?”  He slipped a hand around the bulge in my trousers and squeezed, and I made a rather embarrassing yelp.

“Or maybe...” John mumbled contemplatively, massaging my cock.  I fidgeted, breath hitching as John pressed slow circles with the flat of his palm.

“Maybe – what?” I asked, because I’ll be damned if I let him get away with incomplete thoughts while he’s still capable of finishing them.

I felt him press his other hand to my skull and heard, in John’s voice but somehow _not_ John’s voice, ‘ _It’s just a thought, really.  But, um, if you wanted to..._ ’

My eyes widened.  “Are you...Are you speaking _inside my brain_?”

‘ _More like tricking your auditory cortex into thinking I am, but yeah.  Look, it’s just an idea, we don’t have to or anything, if you’re not comfortable with it, but—_ ’

If I’d actually let him dither on, I am certain sex would not have happened until the next morning.  As it was, I decided to take matters into my own hands by seizing his cock in a fist and asking him plainly, “ _What_ , John, out with it!”

The response was immediate—a jolt of his hips, a sharp gasp, and John groaning, “God, I’m _dying_ to get inside that mind of yours.”  He pressed his fingers tighter against my head, and a static tingle fizzed down my spine.  “What makes you tick, the taste of your memories, the colour and sound of your thoughts—god, Sherlock, you’ve got the most brilliant mind on the entire planet and _I couldn’t ever touch it_.” He hissed out a breath that I could feel against my mouth, his words ringing with yearning.  I was shivering, from the nervous shock and the sudden skip in my chest as I realised what John was asking.  “Please, if you’ll have me, please let me in,” John pleaded.

“Yes,” I whispered, wondering where my fear was.  But somehow, in place of that fear, there was just the warm and giddy sense of trust in this man that I’d had since the beginning.  John moaned something, pressing his forehead to mine, and all at once Stravinsky’s _Le Sacre du Printemps_ was soaring, booming, shrilling, thundering, cascading in my head.  As the flutes trilled, I was taken to the house I grew up in, a great dark thing with five gargoyles reigning over the rooftop and a thick and heady conservatory plastered to the back, stuffed with my mother’s red ginger plants and birds-of-paradise.  The orchestra faded, replaced by the low sound of my mother humming somewhere unseen, John murmuring ‘ _She’s lovely_ ’ and suddenly

 

_Q_ ( _t_ 2) = _Q_ ( _t_ 1) + _Q_ IN – _Q_ OUT

 

                           C19H28O2

                                                                                                               C46H65N13O12S2

 

“ _On conçoit que les molécules des corps étant ainsi continuellement sollicitées par la chaleur à s’écarter les unes des autres, elles n’auroient aucune liaison entr’elles, & qu’il n’y auroit aucun corps solide, si elles n’étoient retenues par une autre force qui tendit à les réunir, & pour ainsi dire à les enchaîner ; & cette force, quelle qu’en soit la cause, a été nommée Attraction._”[22]

 

> The overwhelming smell of Mrs. Hudson’s chocolate biscuits on rainy afternoons – _theobromine, phenethylamine, caffeine, saccharose_ – brown on the bottom, two minutes too long in oven, absolutely no cooking spray, perfection.

 

And John, suddenly John, heart-stopping John, as I’d seen him time and again: holding out his phone to me at Bart’s; standing nonchalantly outside the police line at Roland Kerr College; strapped with semtex; wearing Christmas jumpers; laughing in Buckingham; hunched in a Baskerville cage; hen-pecking his keyboard; a tiny dot in the street; turning in the cemetery; that ridiculous moustache; the flicker of his nictitating membrane.  John making me laugh as he mocked my brother; John standing resolute in the window as he assured me of his belief in me; John taking my pulse over and over, the pads of his fingertips on my skin, and that skip, skip, skip of my mind every time he became more wondrous.

 

Dimly, I felt his real fingers—both sets of them—curling into my hair, heard John’s ragged breathing and whispering of my name, then I was seeing things I’ve never seen before: a grassy field overlaid with men in camo, a sweeping stretch of sand with one vibrant speck of green in the distance, an unfamiliar city glowing with light, and a sharp image of Mary Watson gazing solemnly at me from the other end of a crowded dinner table.  Then I was looking at _myself_ standing on Bart’s roof; I saw the flush in my cheeks at the room in York; me standing over the pink lady’s body; and with each sight, I felt a corresponding emotion—dry, hollow dread; a sucker-punch of desire; euphoric awe.  My heart kicked.  In my head, I could hear two heartbeats racing, knocking into each other, bitonal chords sounding.

‘ _Can you feel it?_ ’ John’s not-voice asked, and suddenly I felt a wave of aching, shivering _want_ in every inch of my skin and a hot, insistent tingling enveloping my cock ( _how?_ His hands were nowhere _near_ ).

“ _Oh fuck yes_ ,” I groaned, thrusting into air, wondering _how_ this was possible, not caring because the heat was spreading at breakneck speed.  Without warning, a spike of pleasure arched through me, as sharp and startling as the current of a Jacob’s Ladder.  My vision went white.  John shuddered in my hands, and I could smell the sharp tang of sweat and musk and sex as I blinked my eyes open to the darkness of my bedroom.  We were breathing hard; John’s crotch was damp and sticky beneath my hands.

“Did you just give me a fucking seizure?” I asked, once I’d caught my breath.  “Or possibly a heart attack?”

John giggled breathlessly.  “No and no.  I made sure not to overdo it.”

I flopped onto my back, feeling my muscles trembling and my clothes sticking to my skin.  John did the same beside me.

He was overtaken with another impromptu giggling fit.  “We’ve got to stop doing this,” he said.  “Having sex with all our clothes still on.”

I snorted, John’s infectious giggle overtaking me briefly.  “I don’t see why not,” I replied.  “We’re clearly benefiting from it.”

We lay there, chortling quietly, letting our sweat cool against our necks and foreheads.  I felt John’s hand stretching out to brush lightly against my cheek.

“Sherlock...thank you,” he whispered.  “For letting me.  It’s beautiful in there.”  He tapped lightly near my temple.

My heart swelled; I grasped his hand and kissed it.  “And I you, John,” I murmured, letting my lips rest on his calluses.  “For the same.”

The peace and darkness of the bedroom ended as an angry buzz came from the vicinity of John’s trousers.  John, sighing, pulled out his phone and looked at the screen.  His face, aglow with the phone’s backlighting, frowned a moment and then tipped backwards as he shook with silent mirth.

“John?”

“Oh _shit_ ,” he laughed.  “Oh shit, I completely forgot about poor Erica.  Today’s Friday.”

“Who?”

“The DI you set me up with, remember?”

I couldn’t help laughing—John had set me off on this giggle fest; it was entirely his fault—and I swore to him that I really hadn’t _meant_ to ruin his sex life.  This time.  But that I had every intention of ruining it some more if he liked.

 

***

 

Thus concludes one of the most spectacular failures in the history of my career, of which I have sworn John into secrecy (not that the task was difficult—he has just as much reason as I do to keep this case quiet).  On recording this case, I had hoped I would have been able to keep the narrative restricted to the purest, mechanical elements of the case in order to better see where my errors of logic resided and so learn from them.  However, perhaps due in part to the significant role that my emotions played in the downfall of this case, and perhaps due in part to John’s sentimental influence on me over the years, it seems I have failed once again in this endeavour.

Regardless of the absurd sensationalism in this treatise, I suppose it could still serve as a memory aid in case my personal hard drive should collapse one day from strain, illness, or accidental deletion.  Despite its faults, this case has given me the chance to bring hidden knowledge out of the veil of obscurity and, if nothing else, it serves as a means to better understand John, and for that, I find myself gratified.

 

_—S. H._  

18 March 2020

  
 

* * *

  
[22]  Charge conservation; molecular formula of testosterone; molecular formula of vasopressin; quote from Antoine Lavoisier’s _Traité Élémentaire de Chimie_ [ _Elementary Treatise on Chemistry_ ] (1789): “It is supposed that since the particles of bodies are thus continually impelled by heat to separate from each other, they would have no connection between themselves; and, of consequence, that there could be no solidity in nature, unless they were held together by some other power which tends to unite them, and, so to speak, to chain them together; which power, whatever be its cause, or manner of operation, we name Attraction.”  And John used to claim that I didn’t understand the concept—he’s unsurprisingly wrong once again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **A/N** : Concluding epitaph for the fic--
> 
> _« Voici mon secret. Il est très simple : on ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux. »_
> 
> —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, _Le Petit Prince_ (1943)


	9. Bonus - Appendix & References

For those among you who are interested in the background info/research involved in the making of this fic, read on!  For those of you who thought this chapter would be some kind of epilogue, my apologies for disappointing you!  (But fear not!  There’s like...two sequels on the way.  Eventually.  Some day.  If they take as long as it took me to write this one *coughoverayearcough*, you might be waiting awhile.)

 

1.  _Etymology/Naming_ : **Sunyata Elliston/Jack Crick** – The word _Sunyata_ is a Sanskrit word meaning “emptiness,” and is the noun form of the adjective _sunya_ (“zero,” “nothing,” or “void”), from which we actually get the word for “zero” as well as “cipher.”  _Sunyata_ is also a term used as a key tenet for various schools of Buddhism, which, depending on who you ask, tends to mean something like “all things ultimately are ‘empty,’ being neither existent nor nonexistent.”  Despite what it may seem, the concept is actually used in either a generally positive or neutral connotation, as Paul Williams clarifies:

> “For both philosophical reasons and also perhaps existential reasons this teaching of emptiness for some have been terrifying.  It certainly looks like nihilism [a philosophy that dictates a “total rejection of social mores, a belief that nothing is worthwhile, a disbelief in objective truth, or a belief in the destruction of authority”], and it encourages a deep letting-go in meditation that could indeed be the true spiritual enlightenment.... **Yet emptiness is also the antidote to fear** , a fear which in its frequent mention must have been some problem for Buddhists at this time.  **For if all is empty, what is there left to fear?** ” ( _Buddhist Thought: A complete introduction to the Indian tradition_.  New York: Routledge, 2000.  Pg. 136)  [bolded emphasis is my own]

In short, it’s a fairly tricky concept to wrap one’s mind around, and different schools will interpret the term a little differently.  However, I think if the Gautama Buddha were to look at our character here, he’d probably say that Elliston skewed the concept _way_ too extremely, probably to something close to nihilism (Buddha was all about moderation, hence the “Middle Way” teaching).

As for the secondary name of “Jack Crick,” I mostly assigned the name as both a call-back to the infamous “Jack the Ripper” as well as to set up another parallel with John—“Jack” is actually the nickname form of “John,” so in official documentation of the time he would appear as “John Crick.”  The “Crick” aspect of his name, as seen in the other footnotes, comes from the partnership of James Watson and Francis Crick in the discovery of DNA.

 

2.  _Naming_ : **Laval Vacher** – While “Laval” is just a pretty palindromic French name in the context of this fic (kindly suggested to me by my lovely beta Shaindy), “Vacher” is a call-back to Joseph Vacher, known as “The French Ripper” who was a contemporary serial killer to Jack the Ripper.  There’s not a whole lot to say about him other than that he was super-crazy and killed somewhere between 11-27+ victims (though you’re welcome to look up [his profile on _Murderpedia_ ](http://murderpedia.org/male.V/v/vacher-joseph.htm)if you so wish).  Mostly I just really wanted to have two rippers in this story so I could call them my “ripperboys.” <3

 

3.  _History_ : **Leopold and Loeb** – At one point in chapter 5, Sherlock refers to his pair of rippers as “Leopold  & Loeb.”  This case is my _favourite_ murder case, and the rather co-dependent nature of these murderers sort of helped serve as the inspiration for my own rippers.  Basically, they were an infamous pair of American murderers—Nathan Leopold, 19, and Richard Loeb, 18, both well-to-do prodigy law students—who murdered a 14-year-old boy in 1924 out of the desire to commit the “perfect crime.”  They failed spectacularly, most notably due to the discovery of a pair of eyeglasses at the scene of the murder, unremarkable in themselves except for their unusual hinge, of which only three people in Chicago owned—one of whom being Nathan Leopold.  The resulting trial went on to become one of several press-dubbed “Trials of the Century.”  The defence attorney’s speech from the trial is one of the most famous speeches in history (which I’ve read part of—Clarence Darrow’s [“In Defense of Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, Jr., on trial for murder” ](http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_plea_of_Clarence_Darrow,_August_22nd,_23rd_%26_25th,_MCMXXIII,_in_defense_of_Richard_Loeb_and_Nathan_Leopold,_Jr.,_on_trial_for_murder/Plea_of_Clarence_Darrow)).  Leopold and Loeb both ended up getting life in prison rather than the death penalty due to Darrow’s masterful defence, but they managed to reform the prison system—they taught classes in the prison school, and although Loeb was stabbed to death in prison, Leopold went on to voluntarily participate in the Stateville Penitentiary Malaria Study and worked as a medical technician.  The case is pretty famous in the States, and it’s inspired several films (such as Alfred Hitchcock’s _Rope_ ) and ALSO A HOMOEROTIC MURDER MUSICAL YESSSSS (called “Thrill Me”—I can’t find many good clips for it, but [here’s one](http://youtu.be/gWsuOh-S1II)).  So if you’re as fascinated as I am by partnered serial killers with inflated egos entwined together in twisted power struggles and homoerotic tension (“You know what a misdemeanour does for me...babe” <\-- actual line from the musical), I recommend you learn more about this case!

 

4.  _Opera_ : **_Lakmé_** – It’s briefly mentioned that on entering the flower shop, Sherlock hears “a soft recording of ‘ _Sous le dôme épais_ ’ from Delibes’s _Lakmé._ ”  This piece is generally known as [“The Flower Duet” ](http://youtu.be/8Qx2lMaMsl8) and is quite popular among sopranos (chances are you’ve heard it before in commercials), and literally all they’re singing about is how pretty the flowers are.  No really, that’s it.  Which is why Sherlock finds it so tacky.  :P  However, another reason I chose to mention this opera is that it was popular at approximately the same time the first Sherlock Holmes stories were coming out and because there’s some parallels between the two main opera characters and my OCs.  So, super-condensed plot: an opera that takes place in India (but was originally written in French), wherein a British officer falls in love with a “Brahmin princess” (colonialist writers, that’s not how Brahmins _work_ ), then realizes his duty to his country is more important than his love for her, and then she kills herself by eating _datura_ leaves.  In my original plotting of this fic, I was planning for Laval to kill Sunyata by injecting him with poison from the _cerbera odollam_ , but then I realized that was a pretty stupid thing to do since he already had John’s gun on him.  The detail was removed, but my little tribute to it remained with the opera mention.  Besides, I just really like poisonous plants and there’s a surprising number of operas where somebody gets killed off via poisonous plant.  OPERAS WITH POISONOUS PLANTS IN THEM, LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT THEM!!!

 

5.  _Mythology_ : **Iris** – So Sherlock already mentioned enough about Mercurian symbols in-text, but what about the weird abundance of irises (IrisNet, the Reichenbach Iris, the “iridescence” of John’s nictitating membrane)?  Basically, while Mercury/Hermes served as a herald/messenger for the Greek and Roman Gods, there’s actually another goddess—yep, Iris—who was also a herald for the Greek gods and is associated with communication and messages.  Like Mercury, she also carried a caduceus and sometimes made trips into the Underworld, though unlike Mercury, she doesn’t seem to have any potentially negative connotations associated with her.  I mean, she personifies rainbows, so she can’t be all that bad.  [Fun fact: the “iris” of a person’s eyes are actually named after her due to all the colours they can reflect, like the rainbow.]  Basically putting in all this iris stuff was kind of just me having my own inside joke—putting Sherlock and John on “Team Iris” versus “Team Mercury” (the ripperboys).  Go Team Iris, go!  TASTE THE RAINBOW MOTHER*^*@#$%!

 

 

References 

And now for the section everyone always skips—the references!  Consider this my shout-out to all the scientists, artists, investigators, and persons of noteworthiness who have come before me, without whose contributions this fic would not have been possible.  Thanks for all your hard work!  (And thanks to the universe, for somehow perfectly aligning at just the right moment so I could write this fic with all this information pre-existing.  Thanks universe!)

 

  1. Arkin, A. M. (1981). _Sleep-talking: psychology and psychophysiology_. Hillsdale, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates.



 

  1. Austin, C. (2005). _Irises: a gardener's encyclopedia_.  Portland, OR: Timber Press. p.185. 



 

  1. Baatz, S. (2008). _For the thrill of it: Leopold, Loeb, and the murder that shocked Chicago_. New York: HarperCollins.



 

  1. Barry, J. M. (2004). _The great influenza: the epic story of the deadliest plague in history_. New York: Viking.



 

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  1. Bernard, S., Gonze, D., Cajavec, B., Herzel, H., & Kramer, A. (2005). “Synchronization-Induced Rhythmicity Of Circadian Oscillators In The Suprachiasmatic Nucleus.” _PLoS Computational Biology_ , _preprint_ (2007), e68.



 

  1. Bohr, N.  (1913).  “On the constitution of atoms and molecules.”  _Philosophical Magazine_ 26: 1-24, 476-502, 857-75.



 

  1. Butler, A. B., & Hodos, W. (2005). _Comparative vertebrate neuroanatomy evolution and adaptation_ (2nd ed.). Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley-Interscience.



 

  1. "cipher | cypher, n." (December 2011). _OED Online_. Oxford University Press. (accessed 4 March 2012).



 

  1. Crick, F., & Koch, C. (2003). "A framework for consciousness." _Nature Neuroscience_ 6: 119-126.



 

  1. Crick, F., & Koch, C. (1990). “Towards a neurobiological theory of consciousness.” _Seminars in the Neurosciences_ 2: 263-275.



 

  1. Darrow, C. (1924).   _The plea of Clarence Darrow, August 22nd, 23rd & 25th, MCMXXIII, in defense of Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, Jr., on trial for murder_.  Chicago: Ralph Fletcher Seymour.



 

  1. Delibes, L. (1883). _Lakmé_.  Paris: Heugel  & Fils.



 

  1. Dolginoff, S. (2006). _Thrill me: the Leopold & Loeb story_. New York: Dramatists Play Service.



 

  1. Engle, B. (Dec 1929). "The use of Mercury's caduceus as a medical emblem." _The Classical Journal_ 25 (1): 205.



 

  1. Friedlander, W. J. (1992). _The golden wand of medicine: a history of the caduceus symbol in medicine_. Greenwood Press.



 

  17. Gaillard Y., Krishnamoorthy A., Bevalot F. (2004). “ _Cerbera odollam_ : a 'suicide tree' and cause of death in the state of Kerala, India.”  _Journal of Ethnopharmacology_  95:123-126.

 

  1. Grimal, P. (1996). “Iris.” _The dictionary of classical mythology_ (pp. 237-238). Oxford, England: Blackwell.



 

  1. Higdon, H. (1999). _Leopold and Loeb: the crime of the century_ (Illini books ed.). Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press.



 

  1. Howey, M. O. (1955). _The encircled serpent; a study of serpent symbolism in all countries and ages._ New York City: Arthur Richmond Co.



 

  1. “Joseph Vacher.” (n.d.). _Murderpedia, the encyclopedia of murderers_. Retrieved August 4, 2013, from http://murderpedia.org/male.V/v/vacher-joseph.htm



 

  1. Lacassagne, A. (1899). _Vacher l'éventreur, et les crimes sadiques_. Lyon: Storck.



 

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  1. Lavoisier, A. (1789). _Traité élémentaire de chimie_. Paris: Chez Cuchet.



 

  1. Leopold, N. F. (1958). _Life plus 99 years_. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.



 

  1. Lindeman, R.L. (1942). "The trophic-dynamic aspect of ecology." _Ecology_ 23: 399–418.



 

  1. Lock, S., Last, J. M., & Dunea, G. (2001). _The Oxford illustrated companion to medicine_ (3rd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.



 

  1. Long, H. C. (1924). “Dog’s Mercury ( _Mercurialis perennis_ L.) and Annual Mercury ( _M. annua_ L.).”  _Plants Poisonous to Livestock_.  (2 nd ed.).  Cambridge: Cambridge UP.  p. 67-69.



 

  1. Lorenzini, S. (1678). _Osservazioni intorno alle torpedini_. Florence: l'Onofri.



 

  1. Lutz A., Greischar L.L., Rawlings N.B., Ricard M., Davidson R.J. (2004). "Long-term meditators self-induce high amplitude gamma synchrony during mental practice."  _Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA_ 101: 16369–16373.



 

  1. Menninger, K. (1992). _Number words and number symbols: a cultural history of numbers_. New York: Dover Publications.



 

  1. “Mercury: Location and Orbit.” (n.d.). _ThinkQuest : Library_. Retrieved August 3, 2013, from http://library.thinkquest.org/C005921/Mercury



 

  1. Monier-Williams, Sir Monier. (2nd ed, 1899). _A Sanskrit-English dictionary_. Reprinted Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi 1986: p.1085.



 

  1. Murray, R.M. (1960). “Electrical sensitivity of the ampullae of Lorenzini.” _Nature_ 187(4741): 957.



 

  1. Powell, M. (2013). “The Position of Venus in the Night Sky: 2013-2014 Evening Apparition.” _The Naked Eye Planets in the Night Sky (and how to identify them)_. Retrieved August 3, 2013, from http://www.nakedeyeplanets.com/venus.htm



 

  1. Rechtschaffen, A; Kales, A (1968). _A manual of standardized terminology, techniques and scoring system for sleep stages of human subjects_. US Dept of Health, Education, and Welfare; National Institutes of Health.



 

  1. de Saint-Exupéry, A. (1943). _Le Petit Prince_. Paris: Gallimard.



 

  1. Schmidt, KP and RF Inger (1957). _Reptiles of the world_.  New York: Hanover House, Garden City.



 

  1. Shelton, J. (1998). _As the Romans did: a source book in Roman social history_ (2. ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.



 

  1. Silber, MH; Ancoli-Israel, S; Bonnet, MH; Chokroverty, S; Grigg-Damberger, MM; Hirshkowitz, M; Kapen, S; Keenan, SA et al. (March 2007). "The visual scoring of sleep in adults." _Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine_ 3 (2): 121–31.



 

  1. Simon, H. (1971). _The splendor of iridescence: structural colors in the animal world_. New York: Dodd, Mead.



 

  1. Smith, W., & Anthon, C. (1851). "Iris". _A new classical dictionary of Greek and Roman biography, mythology, and geography, partly based upon the Dictionary of Greek and Roman biography and mythology._ (Rev., ed.,). New York: Harper  & Brothers.



 

  1. Sodickson, L., Bowman, W., & Stephenson, J. (1961). “Single-Quantum Annihilation Of Positrons.” _Physical Review_ 124 (6): 1851-1861.



 

  1. Srivastava, L. M. (2006). _Karmabhumi_. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.



 

  1. Stades, F. C. (2007). _Ophthalmology for the veterinary practitioner_ (2nd rev. and expanded ed.). Hannover: Schlütersche.



 

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  1. Watson, J. D. (1968).  _The double helix: a personal account of the discovery of the structure of DNA_.  New York: Atheneum.



 

  1. Weigle, M. (2007). _Spiders and spinsters: women and mythology_. Santa Fe, N.M.: Sunstone Press.



 

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So remember, dear readers, the next time someone tries to tell you that fanfiction can’t be as “worthy” as original fiction because “you don’t have to do any _real_ work for it,” you can show them this list.  Did I read them all from cover-to-cover?  Of course not.  Anyone can tell you that’s not how research works.  But did I actually look at every single one of these sources for info I needed?  Whenever I possibly could, yes.  (Most of them are easier to find than you would think.)  I like to give credit where it’s due, and for any of the excessively curious out there who want to know more about a subject that was mentioned in the course of the fic—you now know what sources to look for!

 

As for the 50-some-odd of you who followed along on this descent into madness either by subscribing, kudosing, commenting, or by simply being the silent, watchful eyes in the shadows following every step of the way, I'd just like to say--thanks for sticking with this, and I hope you enjoyed your stay!  :D

 

(Also, feel free to ask any questions, should you have any--I like answering questions!)


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